Google's 2 temperature at 1 top_p is still producing output that makes sense, so it doesn't work for me. I want to turn the knob to 5 or 10.

I'd guess SOTA models don't allow temperatures high enough because the results would scare people and could be offensive.

I am usually 0.05 temperature less than the point at which the model spouts an incoherent mess of Chinese characters, zalgo, and spam email obfuscation.

Also, I really hate top_p. The best writing is when a single token is so unexpected, it changes the entire sentence. top_p artificially caps that level of surprise, which is great for a deterministic business process but bad for creative writing.

top_p feels like Noam Chomsky's strategy to "strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum".

Google's models are just generally more resilient to high temps and high top_p than some others. OTOH you really don't want to run Qwen3 with top_p=1.0...