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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

You are technically correct but that's irrelevant from a security perspective. For security as a practical matter we have to treat LLMs as non-deterministic. The same principle applies to any software that hasn't been formally verified but we usually just gloss over this and accept the risk.

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Non-determinism has nothing to do with security, you should use a different word if you want to talk about something else

This is pedantry, temperature introduces a degree of randomness (same input different output) to LLM, even outside of that non-deterministic in a security context is generally understood. Words have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used.

Let's not reduce every discussion to semantics, and afford the poster a degree of understanding.

If you're saying that "non-determinism" is a term of art in the field of security, meaning something different than the ordinary meaning, I wasn't aware of that at least. Do you have a source? I searched for uses and found https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/95890/necessity-o... and https://medium.com/p/641f061184f9 and these seem to both use the ordinary meaning of the term. Note that an LLM with temperature fixed to zero has the same security risks as one that doesn't, so I don't understand what the poster is trying to say by "we have to treat LLMs as non-deterministic".

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