Introduction

I've spent the last few days going through every glitch token listed in the third SolidGoldMagikarp glitch token post, and was able to find the cause/source of almost every single one. This is the first in a series of posts in which I will explain the behaviors of these glitch tokens, the context in which they appear in the training data, and what they reveal about the internal dynamics of LLMs. If you're unfamiliar with glitch tokens, I highly suggest you read the glitch token archaeology posts first.

My process involved searching through OpenWebText, a recreation of GPT2 training data, and prompting GPT2 to locate the context of the training data.

Previous Context

In their 2023 post, the authors made the following pronouncement in regard to the glitch token ' practition' (token_id: 17629). I took it as a personal challenge.

The first thing I found was that ' practitioner' (32110) and ' practitioners' (24068) were both already tokens in the GPT2 tokenizer. Furthermore, all three tokens also present in the GPT3.5/4 and GPT4o tokenizers, meaning they weren't an artifact of GPT2's training data!

There were only 13 examples of " practition" in OpenWebText.

['urlsf_subset00-928_data.xz', '\nThe WCC is also a prominent supporter and practitioning body for Peace journalism: journalism practice that'], ['urlsf_subset01-45_data.xz', ' what is now the Czech Republic, became a noted practitioneer of lagers, and geology again']
['urlsf_subset06-66_data.xz', 'The site relaunched on Wordpress VIP, practitioned by ESPN and 10up, a company']
['urlsf_subset07-802_data.xz', ' one possible explanation for the positive association between BDSM practitioning and subjective well-being.”'], ['urlsf_subset09-305_data.xz' , ' that vital personal touch that feudalism asked of its practitioning monarchs. He made wild leaps of']
['urlsf_subset11-474_data.xz', ' of the Senators asked “…if a health practitionerr is advising a patient to go on a']
['urlsf_subset11-809_data.xz', ' the full range of Buddhist traditions and the diversity of practition-ers today. As Buddhism in the West']
['urlsf_subset12-398_data.xz', ' one possible explanation for the positive association between BDSM practitioning and subjective well‐being. Several limitations']
['urlsf_subset13-921_data.xz', ' availa ble.\n\nSecondly , LCA practitione rs need to comply with the ISO\n']
['urlsf_subset15-258_da

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