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That's interesting. I just asked ChatGPT to explain how it decides "a" vs "an" and it confirmed that it will retroactively change "a" to "an" when it finds tha

That's interesting. I just asked ChatGPT to explain how it decides "a" vs "an" and it confirmed that it will retroactively change "a" to "an" when it finds that the following word sounds like it starts with a vowel sound. It could have been hallucinating, of course. But it does seem like it occasionally alters already generated words as it goes, at least I think I've seen it do that.

mungoman2 4y ago
ChatGPT can't really introspect though. It has no idea how it works, so it'll just blurt out something that sounds feasible, biased by your prompt. The slow progression of ChatGPT output is just a property of the output layer. The language engine doesn't work slowly like that, and once a token has been generated it can't backtrack.
- tkanarsky 4y ago
  What specifically causes the output layer to trickle-print the response like that? I thought it was a skeumorphic effect to simulate a human typing out an answer slowly.
  - redox99 4y ago
    Its input is a sequence of tokens (so text), and its output a list of probabilities for the single next token. You pick the highest probability token, append it to input and execute the neural network again. If it outputs an "<end>" token, it means it's done you stop this "while loop". In other words, it outputs one token at a time.
    - EricLeer 4y ago
      True, but this entire loop happens within the model, if you would return an output at every intermediate step the model would be extremely slow. My take on why they have build the output layer like it is, is that next to feeling more human, it also forces you to be a bit more thoughtfull with your requests, and thus spam the system less. In the end it is still really expensive to run these models..
      - redox99 4y ago
        > True, but this entire loop happens within the model No, it's literally a for loop in python that runs the whole thing from scratch[1] after appending each new token. No artificial slowdowns, what you're seeing is literally what it's spitting out in real time Here's an example https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT/blob/master/mingpt/model.py#L289 https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT/blob/master/mingpt/model.... [1] Some things can be cached such as kv, but still

mungoman2 4y ago

ChatGPT can't really introspect though. It has no idea how it works, so it'll just blurt out something that sounds feasible, biased by your prompt. The slow progression of ChatGPT output is just a property of the output layer. The language engine doesn't work slowly like that, and once a token has been generated it can't backtrack.

tkanarsky 4y ago
What specifically causes the output layer to trickle-print the response like that? I thought it was a skeumorphic effect to simulate a human typing out an answer slowly.
- redox99 4y ago
  Its input is a sequence of tokens (so text), and its output a list of probabilities for the single next token. You pick the highest probability token, append it to input and execute the neural network again. If it outputs an "<end>" token, it means it's done you stop this "while loop". In other words, it outputs one token at a time.
  - EricLeer 4y ago
    True, but this entire loop happens within the model, if you would return an output at every intermediate step the model would be extremely slow. My take on why they have build the output layer like it is, is that next to feeling more human, it also forces you to be a bit more thoughtfull with your requests, and thus spam the system less. In the end it is still really expensive to run these models..
    - redox99 4y ago
      > True, but this entire loop happens within the model No, it's literally a for loop in python that runs the whole thing from scratch[1] after appending each new token. No artificial slowdowns, what you're seeing is literally what it's spitting out in real time Here's an example https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT/blob/master/mingpt/model.py#L289 https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT/blob/master/mingpt/model.... [1] Some things can be cached such as kv, but still