Spinning the word wheel
When a model talks, it doesn't always pick its biggest guess.
It spins a wheel. Big guesses get big slices.
A dial called temperature changes the wheel.
Cold makes the biggest slice win almost every time. Hot makes the slices more even, so surprises happen.
This is Qwen's real wheel. Spin it!
Your turn
Pick cold or hot. Then spin.
Recorded Qwen measurement· real shares; the spin is random in your browser- .14 in 100a full stop
- .↵9.9 in 100a full stop and a new line
- and8.7 in 100and
- ,7.7 in 100a comma
- to6.8 in 100to
- ↵6.0 in 100a new line
- The3.6 in 100The
- others43 in 100every other word
The slices are Qwen3-8B-Base's real shares after "The researcher opened the notebook", recorded at these six temperatures. The spin is a random draw in your browser.
Temperature changes how surprising the next word can be.
Grown-up corner: the precise version
- wheel = probability distribution
- spin = sampling
- dial = temperature
Shares at temperature T are exp(z / T − logsumexp(z / T)). The scores z and the full-vocabulary normalizers were recorded from Qwen3-8B-Base, so each slice is exact at the six recorded temperatures; other temperatures are not offered. "Everything else" is the rest of the 151,936-token vocabulary.
The spin itself is a random draw in your browser; nothing reruns the model.