| I think this gets at a major hurdle that needs to be overcome for truly human-level AGI. Because the human brain is also non-deterministic. If you ask a software engineer the same question on different days, you can easily get different answers. So I think what we want from LLMs is not determinism, just as that's not really what you'd want from a human. It's more about convergence. Non-determinism is ok, but it shouldn't be all over the map. If you ask the engineer to talk through the best way to solve some problem on Tuesday, then you ask again on Wednesday, you might expect a marginally different answer considering they've had time to think on it, but you'd also expect quite a lot of consistency. If the second answer went in a completely different direction, and there was no clear explanation for why, you'd probably raise an eyebrow. Similarly, if there really is a single "right" answer to a question, like something fact-based or where best practices are extremely well established, you want convergence around that single answer every time, to the point that you effectively do have determinism in that narrow scope. LLMs struggle with this. If you ask an LLM to solve the same problem multiple times in code, you're likely to get wildly different approaches each time. Adding more detail and constraints to the prompt helps, but it's definitely an area where LLMs are still far behind humans. |