12
Lesson 12 · 2 min
Temperature: safe or creative
Temperature is the setting that decides whether AI picks the most likely next word or takes a risk.
Remember that a chatbot picks each next word from a list of likely options. Temperature controls how adventurous that pick is.
Low temperature means it nearly always picks the top option. Answers are steady and predictable, good for facts, summaries and code. High temperature lets it pick less likely words. Answers become more varied and creative, but also more likely to drift or go wrong.
Most chat apps do not show this setting, but developer tools do. In a normal chat you can get a similar effect with words: "give me the most standard answer" or "give me ten wild ideas".
Try it below: move the temperature slider and watch the odds for the next word flatten or sharpen.
Guess the next word
Press Sample to let the AI add one word at a time. Then slide the temperature and try again.
The best thing about Monday is
What could come next
- the37%
- coffee22%
- that18%
- it11%
- nothing7%
- lunch5%
The AI never “knows” the next word. It gives every possible word a score, turns the scores into odds, then rolls weighted dice. Temperature changes how lopsided the dice are: at 0 it always takes the favourite, so you get the same sentence every time; turned up, long shots get a real chance and the writing gets surprising.
Do it now
Turn the temperature up with words
- 1.Ask for a name for a small café in a safe, standard way.
- 2.Then use the prompt below to push it to be more adventurous.
- 3.Compare the two lists.
Give me 10 names for a small café in [YOUR CITY]. Make the first 3 safe and normal, and the last 7 increasingly unusual and surprising.
Words from this lesson
- Temperature
- A setting that controls how predictable or varied an AI's word choices are. Low is steady, high is more surprising.
- Token
- A chunk of text, often part of a word, that AI reads and writes in. Limits and prices are counted in tokens.
- LLM
- An AI trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word, which lets it write, summarise, translate and chat.