Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kazinator 306 days ago
This is a SaaS problem, not a LLM problem. If you have a local LLM that nobody is upgrading behind your back, it will calculate the same thing on the same inputs. Unless there is a bug somewhere, like using uninitialized memory, the flaoting-point calculations and the token embedding and all the rest do the same thing each time.
2 comments

So could SaaS LLM or cloud/api LLMs not offer this as an option? A guarantee that the "same prompt" will always produce the same result.

Also the way I usually interpret this "non-deterministic" a bit "broader".

Say i have have slightly different prompts "what's 2+2?" vs. "can you please tell me what's 2 plus 2" or even "2+2=?" or "2+2" for most applications it would be useful if they all produce the same result

The form of the question determines the form of the outcome, even if the answer is the same. Asking the same question in a different way should result in the adherence to the form of the question.

2+2 is 4

2 plus 2 is 4

4=2+2

4

Having the LLM pass the input to a tool (python) will result in deterministic output.

Doesn’t that imply that LLMs are just “if then, then that” but bigger?
Sure, why would you expect it to be different?
Well I do because not a day has passed since 2021 where the general popular discourse on the subject of AI has not referenced it's functionality as fundamentally novel