Trivia: Claude Shannon proposed the idea of predicting the next token (letter) using statistics/probabilities in the training data corpus in 1950: "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English" https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Shannon1950.pdf

▲

Anon84 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It goes back a bit further than that. His 1948 “Mathematical theory of communication” [1] already has (what we would now call) a Markov chain language model, page 7 onwards. AFAIK, this was based on his classified WWII work so it was probably a few years older than that

[1] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

	▲	aix1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was just reading Norbert Wiener's "The Human Use of Human Beings" (1950) and this quote gave me a good chuckle: "One may get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a sequence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language, and the gibberish thus obtained will have a remarkably persuasive similarity to good English."

▲

Trinicode 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

A letter is not a token, is it? Redundancy could hit 75% in long sentences, but Shannon was not predicting tokens or words, he was predicting letters (characters).