[anankaie]

While I agree with you on the relation of GP's Hyp1 and Hyp2, you are making an unfounded assumption of a sampling process being necessary to perform human speech. I do not believe we have the understanding of how thought is represented in the human brain to make that judgement. In other words, just because sampling from a distribution can produce human-like text does not mean that it is the only way to do that, and thus that it must be the way that humans produce text, spoken or written.

[bryan0]

We might be talking about 2 different things. I was referring to the backwards learning pass and you seem to be referring to the forward inference pass, but what is an alternative to learning (or producing) text which does not involve sampling from some larger space? (Also I’m not a statistician so I’m not sure if these are technically “distributions”)