Note too that despite the output being sampled from a distribution based on a "randomness" temperature, there are many case where what it is trying to say so much constrains the output that certain words/synonyms/concepts are all but forced.
1. we don't know what they(coding layer between bing and GPT) look up and store as a prompt aka working memory.
2. it can do the equivalent of receiving it's own prompt silently.
I seen with code it outputs the step for the code then writes the code.
so there's some kind of plan and execute going on. maybe it can do that in model some how
The simple answer is that the internal state that picks the next token is stable over iterations so that the model can follow a consistent plan over multiple token outputs. Then as the plan "unfolds" in the output tokens, these tokens help stabilize the plan further, thus creating consistency over long generations.
This is Wharton professor Ethan Mollick playing with the new Bing chat, which seems considerably more advanced than ChatGPT (based on GPT-4 perhaps?).
Here he asks it to write something using Kurt Vonnegut's rules of writing.
https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1626084142239649792
It seems hard to explain how Bing/GPT could have generated the Vonnegut-inspired cake story, having ingested the rules, without planning the whole thing before generating the first word.
It seems there's an awful lot more going on internally in these models than a mere word by word autoregressive generation. It seems the prompt (in this case including Vonnegut's rules) is ingested and creates a complex internal state that is then responsible for the coherency and content of the output. The fact that it necessarily has to generate the output one word at a time seems to be a bit misleading in terms of understanding when the actual "output prediction" takes place.