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ozgung 18 hours ago

As a human, in the photo of that sandwich I see 4 slices of bread and 4 slices of cheese (distributed unevenly). I have no idea about the weight of the bread, flour type or its sugar content. I don't know the type of the cheese, dimensions of the slices or total amount of cheese inside the bread. I don't know if there is butter or anything else inside. I can guess the size of the plate as a size reference but I can't be sure. Human or AI, it's an ill-posed problem. There can be widely different estimates which can be equally plausible.

bcjdjsndon 18 hours ago | parent [-]

But why would the same llm give you wildly different answers EACH TIME you ask?

pkaye 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is a parameter in LLMs called temperature that controls creativity/randomness. If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic. I think some LLMs expose this as a tunable parameter.

muwtyhg 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The study used a temperature of 0.01.

> "Thirteen food photographs were each submitted 495–561 times to four LLM vision APIs (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) using an identical structured prompt adapted from the iAPS automated insulin delivery system (26,904 total queries, temperature 0.01)"

jihadjihad 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic.

No, it doesn't. It can help make the model more deterministic, but it does not guarantee it.

azakai 14 hours ago | parent [-]

The hardware can also add nondeterminism. GPUs reorder operations, leading to different results.

Vendors might also be running A/B testing or who knows what, even when you ask for a temperature of 0.

But, if you run a fixed model with temperature 0 on your local CPU, it will be deterministic (unless there are bugs).

zdragnar 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because that's how they work? They aren't knowledge machines, they are random generators.

bcjdjsndon 17 hours ago | parent [-]

They're next word predictors. They explicitly add in randomness at various stages of the transformer itself, otherwise it'd be too obvious it's not actually intelligent and just a next word predictor

pertymcpert 16 hours ago | parent [-]

No that's not why.