The distribution is conditional on the tokens that came before it. Change an earlier token and the same model produces a different ranking of candidates. This is what it means to call the output a conditional probability: the probability of the next token given the preceding sequence. The model has no fixed answer stored for a prefix; the prefix itself determines which candidates rise.
How ChatGPT Writes One Token at a Time
Predicting the Next Token
Context Reshapes the Ranking
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Here is the part that makes this a language model rather than a lookup table. The distribution you just saw is not fixed. It is conditional on the tokens that came before it.
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