Concept
Temperature
Sampling parameter that controls randomness — lower is more deterministic, higher more creative.
Definition
Temperature divides logits before the softmax. Temperature 0 collapses to greedy decoding; values >1 flatten the distribution, increasing diversity (and incoherence). Typical chat defaults are 0.6–0.8. It is the single most impactful sampling knob.
Common use cases
- Creative writing
- Deterministic tests
- Brainstorming