9 ms·
The discourse around this is annoying. A big group of people use "next-token predictor" to imply that LLMs aren't capable of anything interesting. Another big g
by wat10000 1mo ago
The discourse around this is annoying. A big group of people use "next-token predictor" to imply that LLMs aren't capable of anything interesting. Another big group of people opposes the use of "next-token predictor" because of that implication. But that fight isn't about the "predictor" language at all.
The linked article makes a good point: a substantial chunk of the training does not consist of "here's a bunch of tokens, here's the next token, learn that." But all the comments want to turn it into a referendum on the goodness of AI.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoThe fight is about the predictor language in some cases. Because it's only a trivial difference to those who don't understand the details of how these things are made. In pre-training the model really is trained to predict the next token. What is being emitted by the model is, by structure, by training and by optimization, a prediction of the very next token. What is emitted by a model during RLHF and RLVR is not, by structure, training or optimization, a prediction of the next token.
- wat10000 1mo agoRight. But that's never what the discussion is about. This is the first time I've seen someone say, "it's not just a next-token predictor because a bunch of the training isn't about predicting the next token." I have seen many, many people say "it's not just a next-token predictor because there's all this smart stuff going on inside the model." Even here, in the comments for an article that's all about the former, most of the objections to "next-token predictor" are of the latter form.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoYup, you are mostly right. I guess the people in my camp find the "it's just a next token predictor" stupid in that it's like saying "it's just a bunch of carbon and hydrogen", but it's also one of those things where people like to think they are clever because they think they are theoretically correct. But they aren't even that. So it's like double stupid. But the "next token predictor" part is at least technically correct (like, carbon and hydrogen right) for pretraining, so the debate can't really be won there.
- dijksterhuis 1mo agothey are cleverly arranged / configured next-most-likely-token predictors, possibly with some clever procedures / attachments on top.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoNope. This isn't right.
- dijksterhuis 1mo ago> "it's not just a next-token predictor because a bunch of the training isn't about predicting the next token." clever procedures on top of the base transformer architecture. i used simplified words/phrases to summarise the same thing you two were saying (the intent being: here's a version that may be digestible when discussing with others). apparently that means i'm wrong though, no idea why because it seems you've decided to be dismissive rather than constructively elaborate on why this simplified and digestible version might be wrong :shrug:
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoThey aren't predicting the next token. It's quite literally not a prediction.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- gwerbin 1mo agoThey're estimating a probability distribution over the next token, from which a sample is taken. Close enough.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoIt's not an estimation of something. It's a policy.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- wonnage 1mo agoYou can pour a bunch of beads into a pachinko board and end up with a normal distribution. Do the system “know” they need to go there? Then you feed a bunch of tokens into a GPU and end up with a distribution of possible next tokens…