eli5: Why does ChatpGPT give responses word-by-word, instead of the whole answer straight away?

Question

This goes for almost all AI language models that I’ve used.

I ask it a question, and instead of giving me a paragraph instantly, it generates a response word by word, sometimes sticking on a word for a second or two. Why can’t it just paste the entire answer straight away?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Because the specific task that these Large Language Models are trained to perform is not to “answer the question”, but to “guess the next word”. It just so happens to be that solving the problem of “guessing the next word” is apparently a decent enough method for solving problems and generating answers to questions.