Re:The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
by hackinthebochs on Thursday November 06, 2025 @12:02PM
(#45837396)
They are deterministic in the sense that the inference process scores every word in the vocabulary in a deterministic manner. This score map is then sampled from according to the temperature setting. Non-determinism is artificially injected for ergonomic reasons.
>But I think there’s still the question if this process is more similar to thought or a Markov chain.
It's definitely far from a Markov chain. Markov chains treat the past context as a single unit, an N-tuple that has no internal structure. The next state is indexed by this tuple. LLMs leverage the internal structure of the context which allows a large class of generalization that Markov chains necessarily miss.
>But I think there’s still the question if this process is more similar to thought or a Markov chain.
It's definitely far from a Markov chain. Markov chains treat the past context as a single unit, an N-tuple that has no internal structure. The next state is indexed by this tuple. LLMs leverage the internal structure of the context which allows a large class of generalization that Markov chains necessarily miss.