this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
236 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
83600 readers
3974 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What are you saying precisely? It’s well known that LLMs have non-deterministic output (Ilya Sutskever even claims as such). Are you saying the way it goes about retrieving tokens as deterministic?
I think you’re right about that, but it is artificial nondeterminism in the sense that it’s relying on several algorithmic factors and, more subtly, device differences. The system itself is a complex yet deterministic function.
I can agree with that largely but I still contend you’re conflating a few things to make that argument. Fundamentally an LLM will make predictions based on probability (ignoring temperature) and probability does not equal certainty.
I would argue that’s empirically true but not fundamentally true. Actually, I’d argue that my point is the fundamental truth here. Computers still cannot generate random output. They simulate the process, and it’s not truly random. It’s just good enough to fool us at the surface level.
They are deterministic but complex to determine.
The Assumed Intelligence systems I'm familiar with have a "random" element, but it's unclear where that source of randomness comes from. It it using a computational random source, or something like the lava lamp wall at Cloudflare, which is significantly more random, potentially actually random.
It’s temperature primarily. That being said there is still a chance that an LLM can output values that are unexpected even at low temperatures.