Equation 3 · From n-Grams to Reasoning Models: A Technical History of the Language Model
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Symbol n
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It has one fatal structural property. The number of possible contexts grows exponentially in n while the corpus does not, so almost every context of any useful length has been seen zero times. Maximum-likelihood counting assigns those contexts probability zero, and a single zero anywhere in a sentence sends the whole sequence probability to zero. The model is not merely uncertain about unseen material; it is confidently, catastrophically wrong about it.
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