[thaanpaa]

Well, the fun part is that the algorithms themselves are deterministic. They are just so afraid of model distillation that they force some randomness on top (and now hide thinking). Arguably for coding, you'd probably want temperature=0, and any variation would be dependent on token input alone.

[hexaga]

Meh. Temp 0 means throwing away huge swathes of the information painstakingly acquired through training for minimal benefit, if any. Nondeterminism is a red-herring, the model is still going to be an inscrutable black box with mostly unknowable nonlinear transition boundaries w.r.t. inputs, even if you make it perfectly repeatable. It doesn't protect you from tiny changes in inputs having large changes in outputs _with no explanation as to why_. And in the process you've made the model significantly stupider.

As for distillation... sampling from the temp 1 distribution makes it easier.