What Do Temperature and Top-p Actually Do? (AI's Creativity Dials) — [AI Stack 05]

Temperature and top-p are the two settings that control how an AI model picks each next token: at every step the model produces a probability for every possible token, and these dials decide whether it plays it safe and grabs the most likely one or takes a chance on something less obvious. Episode 5 of The AI Stack explains what really happens when a model "samples," why temperature flattens or sharpens its choices, how top-p cuts off the long tail of bad options, when to turn them down for facts and code and up for brainstorming, and why the same prompt can give you a different answer every time. ▶ The AI Stack — full course in order: [playlist] ← Previous: [AI Stack 04] What a Context Window Is → Next: [AI Stack 06] How Transformer Attention Actually Works #temperature #topp #LLM