With LLMs the output depends on the phases of the moon.
As with LLMs, unless you ask for the output to be nondeterministic. But any compiler can be made nondeterministic if you ask for it. That's not something unique to LLMs.
> With LLMs the output depends on the phases of the moon.
If you are relying on a third-party service to run the LLM, quite possibly. Without control over the hardware, configuration, etc. then there is all kinds of fuckery that they can introduce. A third-party can make any compiler nondeterministic.
But that's not a limitation of LLMs. By design, they are deterministic.
Not unique as in: no one makes their compilers deterministic, and you have to work to make a non-deterministic one. LLMs are non-deterministic by default, and you have to contort them to the point of uselessness to make them deterministic
> If you are relying on a third-party service to run the LLM, quite possibly. Without control over the hardware, configuration, etc.
Again. Even if you control everything, the only time they produce deterministic output is when they are completely neutered:
- workaround for GPUs with num_thread 1
- temperature set to 0
- top_k to 0
- top_p to 0
- context window to 0 (or always do a single run from a new session)
Go (gc) was specifically designed to produce reproducible builds, so clearly that's not true, but you are right that it isn't the norm.
Some of the most widely recognized and used compilers, like gcc, clang, even rustc, are nondeterministic. If you work hard and control all the variables (e.g. -frandom-seed), you can make these compilers deterministic, but, hey, if you work hard you can make LLMs nondeterministic too.