SMRTR AISep 6, 2026lobste.rs

Stop Thinking of LLMs as Next-Token Predictors

SMRTR summary

Calling LLMs "next-token predictors" misses the full picture. While that describes their inference-time behavior, modern LLMs use reinforcement learning to explore new sequences and maximize rewards, not just mimic training data. The mechanism looks the same, but what it encodes is fundamentally different.

SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to lobste.rs.

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