Chapter 1 of 10All chapters
Chapter 1 of 10
What generative means
Producing, not classifying.
The difference
A classifier sorts inputs into categories. A generative model learns the shape of its training data well enough to produce new samples from it.
- Novel output is the point, which is also why it can be confidently wrong.
- The same underlying idea covers text, images, audio and code.
Not a database
It stores patterns in weights, not documents. Occasionally it reproduces training text closely, which is a memorisation failure rather than the normal mode.