this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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[–] arc99@lemmy.world 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hardly surprising. Llms aren't -thinking- they're just shitting out the next token for any given input of tokens.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's exactly what thinking is, though.

[–] arc99@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

An LLM is an ordered series of parameterized / weighted nodes which are fed a bunch of tokens, and millions of calculations later result generates the next token to append and repeat the process. It's like turning a handle on some complex Babbage-esque machine. LLMs use a tiny bit of randomness ("temperature") when choosing the next token so the responses are not identical each time.

But it is not thinking. Not even remotely so. It's a simulacrum. If you want to see this, run ollama with the temperature set to 0 e.g.

ollama run gemma3:4b
>>> /set parameter temperature 0
>>> what is a leaf

You will get the same answer every single time.