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AI Atlas

Text Generation

Continue a passage, one word at a time

Language & knowledgeBeginner #01
inTextText

WHAT THIS CAPABILITY MEANS

Given a passage as context, the model writes what comes next. Both input and output are text and no particular transformation is targeted: it can continue a story, finish an explanation or draft an email. It differs from conversation in that no instruction format is required, and from summarisation or translation in that neither compression nor a language switch is the goal — both ends stay in the same modality.

How it is done

The dominant route is an autoregressive Transformer language model: text is split into tokens, the model predicts the probability of the next token position by position, and training maximises likelihood over the corpus. GPT, Llama and Qwen all follow it, differing in scale, data and post-training recipe. At inference, temperature, top-k and top-p shape diversity, while long outputs reuse cached keys and values to cut cost.

Representative products

27

GPT-4o

2024
OpenAI

A natively multimodal general model, with text, image and audio through one door

Model Closed
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Llama

2023
Meta AI (FAIR)

The model family that made the open-weight route mainstream

Model Open weights
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Qwen

2023
Alibaba (Qwen)

An open-weight family spanning many sizes, with multimodal versions

Model Open weights
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DeepSeek-V3

2024
DeepSeek

An open-weight MoE with 671B parameters, activating 37B per token

Model Open weights
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Mistral Large

2024
Mistral AI

The flagship commercial model from a European open-weights lab

Model Closed
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Gemini

2023
Google DeepMind

A natively multimodal general model built for very long context

Model Closed
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Claude

2023
Anthropic

A general chat model known for long context and safety alignment

Model Closed
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MiniMax-M

2025
MiniMax

An open-weight reasoning model with hybrid attention and a million-token context

Model Open weights
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DeepSeek-R1

2025
DeepSeek

A reasoning model trained with RL on chains of thought, its weights open under the MIT licence

Model Open weights
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Apple Intelligence

2024
Apple

System-level AI that splits work between on-device and private cloud

App Closed
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Command R

2024
Cohere

A commercial model built for retrieval augmentation and tool use

Model Open weights
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Jamba

2024
AI21 Labs

An open-weight model that mixes a state-space model with a Transformer

Model Open weights
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DBRX

2024
Databricks

Databricks’ open-weights MoE language model

Model Open weights
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Gemini

2024
Google DeepMind

One chat entry point that gathers search, office apps and a multimodal model

App Freemium
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Grok

2023
xAI

A chat model tied to a social platform’s live data

Model Closed
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Yi

2023
01.AI

A bilingual Chinese–English open-weight model with very-long-context versions

Model Open weights
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Kimi

2023
Moonshot AI

A Chinese chat assistant known for long-context handling

Model Closed
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Hunyuan

2023
Tencent (Hunyuan)

Tencent’s general model family, with open-weight versions

Model Open weights
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Microsoft Copilot

2023
Microsoft

Conversational AI woven into the operating system and office apps

App Freemium
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Doubao

2023
ByteDance (Seed)

ByteDance’s general chat model and application

Model Closed
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Phi

2023
Microsoft

Small, efficient models built from curated data

Model Open weights
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Step

2023
StepFun

A general model family aimed at multimodality and on-device use

Model Closed
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Baichuan

2023
Baichuan AI

An open-weight general model aimed at Chinese-language use

Model Open weights
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GLM

2023
Zhipu AI

A Chinese general model that began with autoregressive blank-infilling pretraining

Model Closed
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ChatGPT

2022
OpenAI

The chat window that put a large language model in everyone’s hands

App Freemium
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Character.AI

2022
Character.AI

Role-play chat with characters you define and talk to over time

App Freemium
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ERNIE

2019
Baidu

A Chinese model that began with knowledge-enhanced pretraining, an early landmark version

Model Closed
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Organizations involved

Typical uses

  • First drafts and rewriting
  • Drafting email, documents and copy
  • Code comments and API docs
  • Test data and synthetic corpora

How it is evaluated

Perplexity
Predictive uncertainty on held-out text; lower is better
Human-preference Elo
Preference ranking from pairwise comparison
ROUGE/BLEU on constrained tasks
Reference overlap when an answer key exists

Limits and hard parts

  • Fluency is not truth: the model states wrong facts with confidence — hallucination
  • Over long outputs, earlier setup drifts and the text contradicts itself
  • Poor sampling settings can trap the model in repetitive or degenerate loops

Concepts behind it