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Lavalamp too hot (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by swiftywizard@discuss.tchncs.de to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[-] FishFace@piefed.social 109 points 3 weeks ago

LLMs work by picking the next word* as the most likely candidate word given its training and the context. Sometimes it gets into a situation where the model's view of "context" doesn't change when the word is picked, so the next word is just the same. Then the same thing happens again and around we go. There are fail-safe mechanisms to try and prevent it but they don't work perfectly.

*Token

[-] ideonek@piefed.social 20 points 3 weeks ago

That was the answer I was looking for. So it's simmolar to "seahorse" emoji case, but this time.at some point he just glitched that most likely next world for this sentence is "or" and after adding the "or" is also "or" and after adding the next one is also "or", and after a 11th one... you may just as we'll commit. Since thats the same context as with 10.

Thanks!

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 weeks ago

I've got it once in a "while it is not" "while it is" loop.

[-] bunchberry@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

This happened to me a lot when I tried to run big models with low context windows. It would effectively run out of memory so each new token wouldn't actually be added to the context so it would just get stuck in an infinite loop repeating the previous token. It is possible that there was a memory issue on Google's end.

[-] FishFace@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

There is something wrong if it's not discarding old context to make room for new

[-] bunchberry@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

At least llama.cpp doesn't seem to do that by default. If it overruns the context window it just blorps.

[-] FishFace@piefed.social 1 points 3 weeks ago

I think there are parameters for that, from googling.

this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
484 points (97.5% liked)

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