A field guide to AI positions

Temperature & sampling

Publication dates and source age

Sources counted: 4

Newest dated source: 2026-05-14

At least one source was published within the 18-month window.

Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.

Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

Open in the glossary Reading notes · Structured record

In plain language

Settings that influence which next token is chosen from a model's possible outputs. [1] [2]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

Limits & distinctions

Low temperature does not guarantee a correct answer or identical results in every environment. Software, hardware and other execution settings also matter for repeatability. [3] [4]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

A fuller explanation

Sampling chooses among tokens using their probabilities. Lower temperature concentrates the choice on higher-scoring options; higher temperature spreads it more widely. Greedy decoding instead picks the highest-scoring token at each step. [1] [2]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

How it relates to the map

Useful when investigating why answers vary between runs. [2]

Reference this explanation or suggest a correction

Link to this explanation · Suggest a correction · How corrections work

Share this page

https://theaiatlas.org/ideas/temperature/

Download a share image · Vector image

Image previews are summaries. Keep the page link so readers can check the evidence.

Sources and what we read

  1. 1. Text generation

    Publication dates and source age

    Sources counted: 1

    Publication dates are unavailable.

    Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

    Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.

    Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

    Read next-token generation, generation settings, temperature, sampling and prompt-format sections. Library options illustrate the process; defaults and suggested temperatures are not treated as universal chatbot behavior. Live page publication date unspecified.

  2. 2. Generation strategies

    Publication dates and source age

    Sources counted: 1

    Publication dates are unavailable.

    Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

    Some publication dates are unknown; the newest dated source may not be the newest source overall.

    Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

    Read greedy search, multinomial sampling and the custom generation loop separating model logits from token selection. Used to explain decoding choices; library defaults do not establish the behavior of every hosted chatbot. The live page does not establish a publication date.

  3. 3. Reproducibility

    Publication dates and source age

    Sources counted: 1

    Newest dated source: 2026-05-14

    At least one source was published within the 18-month window.

    Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

    Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

    Read the versioned page reached from the stable documentation: cross-release/platform limits, random seeds and deterministic algorithms. Dates follow the page's displayed Created On and Last Updated On fields, not the historical first publication of PyTorch's reproducibility guidance. These are framework constraints, not measurements of a particular chatbot service.

  4. 4. Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile

    Source is over 18 months old.

    Publication dates and source age

    Sources counted: 1

    Newest dated source: 2024-07

    Assessed at this edition's evidence cutoff: 2026-09-15. 18-month boundary: 2025-03-15.

    Publication age does not tell us whether a claim is still valid. Reading an old source again does not make its publication date newer. An update date does not establish that the passage we used was updated.

    Read introduction, section 2.2 on confabulation, and selected MEASURE actions 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.9 concerning evaluation evidence, generalization, citations, generated-code review and safeguards. A voluntary risk-management profile; no claim that all 64 pages or every referenced study was reviewed.

Edition and machine-readable evidence

Content version 0.20.0. Evidence cutoff 2026-09-15; this does not mean every source was read on that day.

Pinned complete dataset · Complete evidence page · Agent consumption guide