True, but I'd argue that you can't get the definite knowledge of an LLM by turning off randomness, or fixing the seed. Otherwise that would be a routinely employed feature, to determine what an LLM "truly knows", removing any random noise distorting that knowledge, and instead randomness would only be turned on for tasks requiring creativity, not when merely asking factual questions. But it doesn’t work that way. Different seeds and will uncover different "knowledge", and it's not the case that one is a truer representation of an LLM's knowledge than another.

Furthernore, even in the absence of randomness, asking an LLM the same question in different ways can yield different, potentially contradictory answers, even when the difference in prompting is perfectly benign.

This is because the knowledge is encoded in a multi-dimensional space, and a seed doesn’t change the knowledge, only the expression of it. If you ask me what E=mc^2 means, I’ll give you different answers depending on whether I think you are a curious lay-person vs. a physicist testing my response.

You see this with humans who encode physical space to physical matrix in our brain. When asking for directions, people have to traverse this matrix until it is memorized, then it isn’t used any longer; only the rote data is referenced.