GPT-3 has a habit of repeating its input. GPT-2 had the same problem, as did all language models before. LSTMs were really bad in this respect and would often

GPT-3 has a habit of repeating its input. GPT-2 had the same problem, as did all language models before. LSTMs were really bad in this respect and would often get stuck in single word loops. GPT-3 just does it less often, and tends to repeat sentences or ideas, rather than single words. A larger corpus and more training seemed to have helped reduce the issue, and I think they tweaked the temperature algorithms as well (I think top-p is an option now, whereas most language models used top-k historically). In my experience GPT repeats itself more often when it doesn't understand the prompt. I mean, if you don't understand _anything_ about an input sequence, what is the most likely next word? One of the previously used words. It's likely that the following occurs: Given the phrase "1+1=? ", the first layer assigns a baseline probability to "1", "+", "=", and "?", because those occur in the input and its a good fallback. But then the layers after recognize the input as a math equation and quickly assign a high probability to "2". Since the probability on "2" is so high the temperature algorithm always picks "2" as the output token. But if we imagine GPT doesn't understand math, then all the layers after the first have no clue what the input is. They can't assign higher probability to anything. They might make a few weak guesses, say "duck". But it isn't confident in them, so really "duck" is as likely as "1". The temperature algorithm then has a fairly decent chance of selecting "1" as the output token. Now GPT is given "1+1=? 1" and it seems like "+" is the next logical token. "1+1=? 1+". And so forth until it GPT is stuck in self reinforcing a loop saying "1+1=? 1+1=? 1+1=? 1+1=?" etc. Funny thing is, it's not like humans don't do this. When you get asked a hard question that you don't have an answer for, don't you find yourself repeating the question to yourself over and over again, hoping you'll better understand it? I'm not necessarily creating a parallel between that behavior and GPT's behavior. Just food for thought, I suppose.