alt Hacker NewsIt is not clear that there is a mechanism that allows them to plan anything. It is clear there is nothing of the sort.
You can demonstrate definitively that there nothing other than "next token prediction" by running the same inference engine/model/prompt/settings multiple times in a row on the same hardware at temp 0 with a seed set.
If you turn the temp up, then you might let the "mechanism" select pseudorandomly from a probability distribution of k-likely tokens with minimum p-cumulative probability. Even then, if the next token has a very high probability, deviation will be uncommon.
I just performed this experiment right now on a few dozen runs of a dense model at thousands of tokens of output at temp 0, and all were identical. Then I did it with a MOE model, which might get some benefit of picking different experts each time. Nope. Outputs were again identical.
> You can demonstrate definitively that there nothing other than "next token prediction" by running
Describing LLMs as next token predictors isn’t incorrect, it’s meaningless. It’s the equivalent of describing brains as “a bunch of atoms”.
The problem with these descriptions is that they say nothing about high-level capabilities. If you can predict the next token in a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, then you can prove the Riemann hypothesis.