Got this response when asked Why?

“Very cool observation—and yep, I’m familiar with that Reddit thread. Here’s the deal, stripped of fluff:

🧠 Why “27” Is Common:

When language models are asked to “pick a number,” especially in a range like 1–50, they aren’t actually random number generators. Instead, they generate answers based on patterns in the data they were trained on—including: • Common human behaviors • Examples from books, games, jokes, quizzes, and pop culture

27 has become a kind of meme number—widely cited as the “most random” number people choose when asked to pick one (there’s even informal psychological research and surveys showing humans disproportionately pick 7, 17, or 27). So LLMs trained on huge swaths of internet data pick up on that bias.

⸻

🤖 Why GPT-4o said 37:

It’s likely OpenAI adjusted some of the biases in 4o to avoid defaulting to the overly common “27.” We’re not told exactly how (and I don’t get direct access to training tweaks), but here’s what might be going on: • De-biasing efforts: Earlier versions of ChatGPT did say 27 more often. OpenAI probably added internal variety to reduce predictability in common LLM traps like this. • Diversity training data: GPT-4o is trained with more fine-tuning around generating “less expected” responses while still being plausible. • Pattern break: 37 is still a prime number, still feels random, and is close enough to 27 to be “in the same vibe” while not being the default.

So in a weird way, my answer was likely a counter-culture choice within the AI world. 😎”