Ask HN: Why 17?

3 points by tonyvince7 ↗ HN
If I ask an LLM to pick a number between 1 and 30, it always picks 17. Tried with multiple models. Why 17?

7 comments

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The model selects answers based on learned probabilities; for this type of question, the probability associated with "17" is relatively high, which is why it appears frequently.