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by pkaye 57 days ago
There is a parameter in LLMs called temperature that controls creativity/randomness. If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic. I think some LLMs expose this as a tunable parameter.
2 comments
jihadjihad 57 days ago
> If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic.

No, it doesn't. It can help make the model more deterministic, but it does not guarantee it.

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azakai 57 days ago
The hardware can also add nondeterminism. GPUs reorder operations, leading to different results.

Vendors might also be running A/B testing or who knows what, even when you ask for a temperature of 0.

But, if you run a fixed model with temperature 0 on your local CPU, it will be deterministic (unless there are bugs).

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muwtyhg 57 days ago
The study used a temperature of 0.01.

> "Thirteen food photographs were each submitted 495–561 times to four LLM vision APIs (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) using an identical structured prompt adapted from the iAPS automated insulin delivery system (26,904 total queries, temperature 0.01)"

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