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Comment by jmalicki | Hacker News Reader

For all practical purposes any code reliant on the output of a PRNG is non-deterministic in all but the most pedantic senses... And if the LLM temperature isn't set to 0 LLMs are sampling from a distribution.

If you're going to call a PRNG deterministic then the outcome of a complicated concurrent system with no guaranteed ordering is going to be deterministic too!

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No, this isn't right. There are totally legitimate use cases for PRNGs as sources of random number sequences following a certain probability distribution where freezing the seed and getting reproducibility is actually required.

And for a complicated concurrent system you can also replay the exact timings and orderings as well!

That's completely different from PRNGs. I don't understand why you think those things belong together.

How is this related to overloading? The nondeterminism should not be a function of overloading. It should just time out or reply slower. It will only be dumber if it gets rerouted to a dumber, faster model eg quantized.

Temperature can't be literally zero, or it creates a divide by zero error.

When people say zero, it is shorthand for “as deterministic as this system allows”, but it's still not completely deterministic.

Zero temp just uses argmax, which is what softmax approaches if you take the limit of T to zero anyway. So it could very well be deterministic.

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