AI Glossary

Decoder

What does “Decoder” mean?

Decoder: Within a transformer, the decoder generates output one token at a time, with each step able to see only what came before it. Decoder-only designs power most chatbots and text generators, including the GPT family and Llama.

Decoder visual guide: Within a transformer, the decoder generates output one token at a time, with each step able to see only what came before it. Decoder-only designs power most chatbots and text generators, including the GPT family and Llama.
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What is an example of “Decoder”?

When a chatbot writes a reply word by word, it is running a decoder that repeatedly predicts the next token from everything written so far.

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See also

EncoderTermAutoregressive modelTermGPTTermTransformerTerm

Same topic

Encoder-decoder modelTermVariational autoencoderTermDense modelTermConvolutional neural networkTermDiffusion modelTerm