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UPSC Prelims 2026 GS Paper 1, question 42

Topic: Science and technology

Q42

Which of the following statements with regard to Large Language Models (LLMs) used in machine learning is/are correct ?

  1. LLMs assign probabilities to the next possible words and then pick the one with the highest probability.

  2. LLMs process data through mathematical optimization to minimise prediction errors.

  3. LLMs produce unbiased outputs.

Select the answer using the code given below :

  1. (a) 1 only
  2. (b) 1 and 2 onlyCorrect answer
  3. (c) 2 and 3 only
  4. (d) 1, 2 and 3

Solution.

Answer: (b) 1 and 2 only

  1. Statement 1 is correct: autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) compute a probability distribution over tokens in their vocabulary and select the next token based on those probabilities (such as greedy decoding at temperature zero).
  2. Statement 2 is correct: LLMs are trained via gradient-based mathematical optimization (such as AdamW) to minimize cross-entropy prediction loss over massive text corpora.
  3. Statement 3 is incorrect: because LLMs learn statistical patterns from human-generated training data, they can inherit and amplify societal, historical, and sampling biases.