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I Asked AI to Count My Carbs 27,000 Times. It Couldn’t Give Me the Same Answer Twice.
(www.diabettech.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Technology
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Can you explain how it's more than probability? It's using a neural network to guess the most likely next token, isn't it?
You could also say that it chooses what will be the next word it will say to you. It has a few words to choose from, which it has selected in relation to the previously spoken words, your question and previous interactions (the context). The probability you're talking about (a number) could also be seen as it's preference among those words. I'm not sure the probability vocabulary/analogy is necessarily the best one. The best might be to not employ any analogy at all, but then you have to dig deeper into the subject to form yourself an informed opinion. This series of videos explains it better than I do : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi
The fact that it uses a non-trivial neural network. If it was simply a rate count of based on a corpus of how much time each word is followed by each it wouldn't be stronger than keyboard word predictions. To make accurate suggestions requires emergence of primitive reasoning on the semantics of the tokens, LLM neural networks (transformers) can be analyzed to find subnetworks dedicated to modeling reality. It is still probability, but saying it's just probability is not faithful
It's still just predicting the next token, it's just using more past data points than your keyboard. The rest of the phenomena are emergent from that. I think it's important to keep that in mind given how much they can imitate human reasoning.
If you recognize there's emergence, the "it's just probability" take is misleading