Concept · Building with AI

Next-token prediction

Also called: predicting the next word, autoregressive, autoregression, text prediction, next word prediction, autocomplete

The one job a language model performs. Given the text so far, it picks a likely next token, adds it, and repeats. Every answer, plan or piece of code comes out one token at a time this way, which helps explain why models sound fluent and why they can state wrong things with confidence.

For example: When you ask a chatbot for a tagline, it does not plan the whole line first. It builds the tagline token by token, each choice based on everything written before it.

Connects to 8

• LLM Concept
• Token Concept
• Hallucination Concept
• Probabilistic vs deterministic Concept
• Training Concept
• Output tokens Concept
• Transformer Concept
• Sampling Concept