I think the probability of getting the exact continuation “a a a a a …” is genuinely higher than the probability of getting the exact continuation “little girl who was born with a very special gift...”, though getting a continuation in the class of “a a a a a...” is much lower-probability than getting a continuation in the class of “little girl who was born with a very special gift..”, because the latter class has a much larger possibility space than the former. So there might be 1e4 different low-entropy length-32 completions with an average probability of 1e-10 each, and 9.999999e15 different high-entropy length-32 completions with an average probability of 1e-16. This adds up to normality in that if you were to randomly sample this distribution, you’d get a weird low-entropy output one time in a million, and a normal high-entropy output the other 999999 times in a million. But if you try to do something along the lines of “take the best K outputs and train the model on those”, you’ll end up with almost entirely weird low-entropy outputs.
But yeah, I think I misunderstood your proposal as something along the lines of “take the k most probable n-token outputs” rather than “take the k% most probable n-token outputs” or “randomly sample a bunch of n-token outputs”.
I think the probability of getting the exact continuation “a a a a a …” is genuinely higher than the probability of getting the exact continuation “little girl who was born with a very special gift...”, though getting a continuation in the class of “a a a a a...” is much lower-probability than getting a continuation in the class of “little girl who was born with a very special gift..”, because the latter class has a much larger possibility space than the former. So there might be 1e4 different low-entropy length-32 completions with an average probability of 1e-10 each, and 9.999999e15 different high-entropy length-32 completions with an average probability of 1e-16. This adds up to normality in that if you were to randomly sample this distribution, you’d get a weird low-entropy output one time in a million, and a normal high-entropy output the other 999999 times in a million. But if you try to do something along the lines of “take the best K outputs and train the model on those”, you’ll end up with almost entirely weird low-entropy outputs.
But yeah, I think I misunderstood your proposal as something along the lines of “take the k most probable n-token outputs” rather than “take the k% most probable n-token outputs” or “randomly sample a bunch of n-token outputs”.