(is my understanding)
each prediction is based on a weighted context of all previous tokens, not just the immediately preceding one.
I suppose that when you each element in the vector weighs 16 bits then the space is immense and capable to have a novel in a point.
Expanding on that, you could imagine that the intent of the sentence to complete (figuring out the murderer) would have to be captured in the first attention passes so that other layers would then be able to integrate more and more context in order to extract that information from the whole context. Also, it means that the forward passes for previous tokens need to have extracted enough salient high-level information already since you don't re-compute all attention passes for all tokens for each next token to predict.
You don't? I imagine the attention maps could be pretty different between n and n+1 tokens.
Edit: Or maybe you just meant you don't compute attention Σ(n) times for each new token?
Which means the embedding model must do a lot of the lifting to be able to accurately represent meaning across long contexts so well. Now I want to know more about how those models are derived.
Not with this GPT. The context size would not allow keeping attention to the total meaning of more than 2048 tokens (as reflected in the transformed embedding of that context's last token). For a substantial part of a novel, it would require a much larger context size with then presumably will need a higher dimensional embedding/semantic space.