Comment by kiitos
1 day ago
LLMs are 100% absolutely not deterministic even if you constrain all of their inputs. This is obviously the case, apparent from any even cursory experimentation with any LLM available today. Equivocating the determinism of a compiler given some source code as input, with the determinism of an LLM given some user prompt as input, is disingenuous to the extreme!
Most LLM software isn’t deterministic, sure. But LLMs are just doing a bunch of arithmetic. They can be 100% deterministic if you want them to be.
In practice, they definitely are not.
Only because nobody cares to. Just like compilers were not deterministic in practice until reproducible builds started getting attention.