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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

I suggest getting familiar with or brushing up on the differences between a Markov Chain and a Markov Model. The former is a substantial restriction of the latter. The classic by Kemeny and Snell is a good readable reference.

MC have constant and finite context length, their state is the most recent k tuple of emitted alphabets and transition probabilities are invariant (to time and tokens emitted)

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LLMs definitely also have finite context length. And if we consider padding, it is also constant. The k is huge compared to most Markov chains used historically, but it doesn't make it less finite.

That's not correct. Even a toy like an exponential weighted moving averaging produces unbounded context (of diminishing influence).

What do you mean? I can only input k tokens into my LLM to calculate the probs. That is the definition of my state. In the exact way that N-gram LMs use N tokens, but instead of using ML models, they calculate the probabilities based on observed frequencies. There is no unbounded context anywhere.

That's different.

You can certainly feed k-grams one at a time to, estimate the the probability distribution over next token and use that to simulate a Markov Chain and reinitialize the LLM (drop context). In this process the LLM is just a look up table to simulate your MC.

But an LLM on its own doesn't drop context to generate, it's transition probabilities change depending on the tokens.

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