upvote
We have to keep remembering this for some reason.

New model comes out and someone says, "it can (or can't) draw ducks on bikes" or some esoteric thing. But it's not enough statistical power to claim anything other than a personal anecdote.

I got a flat tire in downtown today. Therefore, driving in downtown causes flat tires.

reply
Honest question about the non-deterministic nature of llms. Every programming language provides some way to control the random seed. Is this not true in GPU programming land?
reply
It doesn't really matter for most purposes. Determinism doesn't make them any less chaotic, it's not like fixing the seed makes the output any more predictable. Some percentage of seeds will behave in ways you don't like for a particular input, and you can't know which beforehand.
reply
Yes, but for one thing, floating-point math is non-associative so even if you use the exact same random seed, you can get different results on different implementation kernels.

For another, the dependence on a random seed is just one example of how you can get different behavior. You could just as well get different results due to e.g. a tiny difference in prompt wording or punctuation or whitespace.

If a model passes some test on 70% of random seeds, and fails on the other 30%, then knowing the rough probability of success is much more useful than knowing one random sample of the outcome.

And empirically this kind of probabilistic success is quite common, because many LLM benchmarks report "pass@k" success rates that are much higher than the "pass@1" success rate on a single attempt.

reply