Logits are unbounded, so they cannot be read as likelihoods directly. Softmax converts them: it exponentiates each logit, which makes every value positive, then divides by the sum of all exponentiated values. The result is a probability distribution in which every value lies between zero and one and the whole set sums to exactly one. Now the numbers are comparable likelihoods rather than arbitrary scores.
How ChatGPT Writes One Token at a Time
Predicting the Next Token
From Logits to Probabilities
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Those logits can be any size, so a score of eight next to a score of two hundred tells you little on its own. To make them comparable, the model runs them through a function called softmax.
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