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hackinthebochs 3 hours ago

There's almost a good point here, but you're misusing concepts that obfuscate the point you're trying to make. Determinism is about producing the same output given the same input. In this sense, LLMs are fundamentally deterministic. Inference produces scores for every word in their vocabulary. This score map is then sampled from according to the temperature to produce the next token. But this non-determinism is artificially injected.

But the determinism/non-determinism axis isn't the core issue here. The issue is that they are trained by gradient descent which produces instability/unpredictability in its output. I can give it a set of rules and a broad collection of examples in its context window. How often it will correctly apply the supplied rules to the input stream is entirely unpredictable. LLMs are fundamentally unpredictable as a computing paradigm. LLMs training process is stochastic, though I hesitate to call them "fundamentally stochastic".

rvz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Determinism is about producing the same output given the same input. In this sense, LLMs are fundamentally deterministic.

You cannot formally verifiy prose or the text that LLMs generates when attempting to compare what a compiler does. So even in this sense that is completely false.

No-one can guarrantee that the outputs will be 100% to what the instructions you are giving to the LLM, which is why you do not trust it. As long as it is made up of artificial neurons that predict the next token, it is fundamentally a stochastic model and unpredictable.

One can maliciously craft an input to mess up the network to get the LLM to produce a different output or outright garbage.

Compilers have reproducable builds and formal verification of their functionality. No such thing with LLMs exist. Thus, comparing LLMs to a compiler and suggesting that LLMs are 'fundamentally deterministic' or is even more than a compiler is completely absurd.

hackinthebochs an hour ago | parent [-]

You're just using words incorrectly. Deterministic means repeatable. That's it. Predictable, verifiable, etc are tangential to deterministic. Your points are largely correct but you're not using the right words which just obfuscates your meaning.