Comment by packetlost
1 day ago
> They’re nondeterministic at a fine level, but can be “deterministic” at a more general level: e.g. you might know that one model will always return properly formatted json when asked. That might not be true of the replacement, even if it is in general “better” and cheaper.
This isn't true. Even Sol messes up JSON formatting for me on occasion.
Do not delude yourself into thinking these things are reliable. They are not.
Is nobody using structured outputs? They use constrained decoding at the generation stage to ensure the probability of tokens that would break the format are set to 0. I kinda figured everyone was doing this at this point.
Most serious providers are now supporting structured outputs in a reasonable way for all model configs. But for example on ollama structured outputs are still incompatible with tool calling and with reasoning
Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama. https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
If you use a large enough volume, you will know this isn't fully reliable. You might get json, and it might not match what the model actually sent because the last layer cut it up to match what you want. At the end, not json, or json but not really matching what the model wanted, it's sort of the same issue: when you use them you HAVE to assume they can have a brain fart. That's fine, just code around it.
We use structured output and To my knowledge it has never failed (millions of data points). There seem to be two classes of people: those doing productive work with LLMs, and those who only get replies insulting their mothers…