this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
309 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
83158 readers
4223 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A phrase that throws more heat than light.
What they are predicting is not the next word they are predicting the next idea
How it functionally works, its the next word / token / chunk a lot more than its an "idea". An idea is even rough to define
The other relatively accurate analogy is a probabilistic database
Neither work if you've fallen into anthropomorphising, but they're relatively accurate to architecture and testing for people that aren't too computer literate, far more than the anthropomorphising alternatives at least
Thanks, I haven't heard this phrase before, but it feels quite descriptive :)
Technically, they are predicting the next token. To do that properly they may need to predict the next idea, but thats just a means to an end (the end being the next token).
Also, the LLM is just predicting it, it's not selecting it. Additionally it's not limited to the role of assistant, if you (mis) configure the inference engine accordingly it will happily predict user tokens or any other token (tool calls etc).