word co-occurrence

You shall know a word by the company it keeps — so choose your prompts wisely

Post

From Firth's distributional hypothesis to modern Transformers, the principle behind generative AI has always been the same: predict the next word by the company it keeps. This post traces that lineage with interactive LSA plots in R, explores why LLMs are fluent but not truthful and argues that good prompting is the best tool we have for steering a fundamentally heuristic machine.