> LLMs also allow you to optionally enable determinism
really? Please explain
really? Please explain
There caveat to that is where external inputs give the illusion of non-determinism. Thread execution order, like we already discussed, is one such example. Technically still deterministic if you understand the external inputs, but for the sake of discussion we can consider external inputs to be non-deterministic. Which is why compilers usually end up being non-deterministic by default. However, computers are designed to be deterministic so there are ways to avoid introducing those external inputs, albeit often at the cost of performance. LLMs and compilers alike can be run deterministically.
LLMs have one additional property not typically found in a traditional compiler — a call to rand() — but rand() is also deterministic when configured with a constant seed and can also be turned off completely by setting temperature to 0.
What's old is new again. LLMs are back to believing that the user doesn't really care what gets spit out, preferring performance over determinism, but it is likely that eventually we'll find increasing importance in reproducible builds again — especially when, like we saw with compilers, the hardware/algorithms catch up and the performance cost of determinism isn't there anymore. The industry is highly cyclical. These aren't hard technical limitations, just human choices mixed with a humorous dose of "this time is different". But in hindsight the times never end up being different, do they?