Lesson 2: How the model picks each word, and the dials
19 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 3 · Lesson 2 · About 50 minutes · Needs: Module 1, Lesson 1 (next-token prediction and greedy decoding)
The situation
It is week 3 at Quillpath. Lena presses "draft again" on T-1001, Ana Duarte's duplicate charge, and the reply opens differently each time. Maya asks two questions. Can the triage label also change between runs, even at temperature 0? And which settings should each task use? To answer, you will watch a small local model, SmolLM2-135M-Instruct, choose each word with every number visible, then carry that to the hosted models.