It's not n sometimes, k tokens some other times. LLMs have fixed context windows, you just sometimes have less text so it's not full. They're pure functions from a fixed size block of text to a probability distribution of the next character, same as the classic lookup table n gram Markov chain model.

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famouswaffles 4 hours ago | parent [-]

1. A context limit is not a Markov order. An n-gram model’s defining constraint is: there exists a small constant k such that the next-token distribution depends only on the last k tokens, full stop. You can't use a k-trained markov model on anything but k tokens, and each token has the same relationship with each other regardless. An LLM’s defining behavior is the opposite: within its window it can condition on any earlier token, and which tokens matter can change drastically with the prompt (attention is content-dependent). “Window size = 8k/128k” is not “order k” in the Markov sense; it’s just a hard truncation boundary.

2. “Fixed-size block” is a padding detail, not a modeling assumption. Yes, implementations batch/pad to a maximum length. But the model is fundamentally conditioned on a variable-length prefix (up to the cap), and it treats position 37 differently from position 3,700 because the computation explicitly uses positional information. That means the conditional distribution is not a simple stationary “transition table” the way the n-gram picture suggests.

3. “Same as a lookup table” is exactly the part that breaks. A classic n-gram Markov model is literally a table (or smoothed table) from discrete contexts to next-token probabilities. A transformer is a learned function that computes a representation of the entire prefix and uses that to produce a distribution. Two contexts that were never seen verbatim in training can still yield sensible outputs because the model generalizes via shared parameters; that is categorically unlike n-gram lookup behavior.

I don't know how many times I have to spell this out for you. Calling LLMs markov chains is less than useless. They don't resemble them in any way unless you understand neither.

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chpatrick 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're confusing Markov chains and "Markov chain text generators". A Markov chain is a mathematical structure where the probabilities of going to the next state only depend on the current state and not the previous path taken. That's it. It doesn't say anything about whether the probabilities are computed by a transformer or stored in a lookup table, it just exists. How the probabilities are determined in a program doesn't matter mathematically.

	▲	saithound an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Just a heads-up: this is not the first time somebody has to explain Markov chains to famouswaffles on HN, and I'm pretty sure it won't be the last. Engaging further might not be worth it.