People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

▲

ryankrage77 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

To a user, many modern UI's are unpredictable and unreliable anyway. "I've always done it this way, but it's not working...".

	▲	layer8 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, but UIs don't need to be that way. Non-smart light switches, thermostats, household appliances, etc. generally aren't that way, and that’s why many people prefer them, and expect UIs to work similarly — which they overall typically still do.

▲

hnfong 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can set the temperature of LLMs to 0 and that will make them deterministic.

Not necessarily reliable though, and you could get different results if you typed an extra whitespace or punctuation.

▲

sealeck 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even then, this isn't actually what you want. When people say deterministic, at one level they mean "this thing should be a function" (so input x always returns the same output y). Some people also use determinism to mean they want a certain level of "smoothness" so that the function behaves predictably (and they can understand it). That is "make me a sandwich" should not return radically different results to "make me a cucumber sandwich".

As you note, your scheme significantly solves the first problem (which is a pretty weak condition) but fails to solve the second problem.

▲

jihadjihad 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You can set the temperature of LLMs to 0 and that will make them deterministic.

It will make them more deterministic, but it will not make them fully deterministic. This is a crucial distinction.

▲

cookingrobot 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s an implementation choice. All the math involved is deterministic if you want it to be.

	▲	Jaxan 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It will still be nondeterministic in this context. Prompts like “Can you do X?” and “Please do X” might result in very different outcomes, even when it’s “technically deterministic”. For the human operating with natural language it’s nondeterministic.

▲

falcor84 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Google is significantly less deterministic than AltaVista was.

▲

erikerikson 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is a parameter that can be changed, often called temperature. Setting the variance to 0 can be done and you will get repeatability. Whether you would be happy with that is another matter.