Hacker News Reader

Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding your last question, ChatGPT isn’t deterministic. It can certainly give a correct answer one time and an incorrect answer another time, for the same prompt.

View on HN

> Regarding your last question, ChatGPT isn’t deterministic. It can certainly give a correct answer one time and an incorrect answer another time, for the same prompt.

It's supposed to be deterministic if you set temperature to 0.0, but seems that doesn't work well in GPT4 compared to earlier versions...

It is not deterministic since text-davinci-001.

https://152334h.github.io/blog/non-determinism-in-gpt-4/

Good to know, I thought it was deterministic, especially because of all the comments on other articles where people wrote that the author was crazy for getting a different answer to the same question.

For the same prompt and same version?

That would be deal breaker if the same prompt gives different results.

Would also make the whole prompt engineering thing pretty useless.

Yes, same prompt and same version. GPT-4 is especially stochastic, even with temperature=0.

So all these comments claiming that an article about the GPT's responses is wrong are useless.

There are also such comments on this article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361521

I wonder why that is. Maybe they’re A/B testing assistant prompts, or there’s noise built into the architecture somewhere.

There was a post about it a while back. From what I recall, it’s an efficiency/cost reduction side effect, but it could be made deterministic, if they wanted to eat the cost.

I firmly disagree with your latter two statements, but yes it is non deterministic

Reply on news.ycombinator.com