Predictable Confabulations: Factual Recall by LLMs Scales with Model Size and Topic Frequency

In three linesStudy of 38 models on 8,900 scholarly references: factual recall quality follows a sigmoid combining model size and topic frequency in training data. These two variables explain 60-94% of variance. Model proposes recall is gated by signal-to-noise ratio scaling with concept frequency and model capacity.

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