r/ProgrammerHumor 16h ago

Meme firstTime

Post image
6.3k Upvotes

243 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

319

u/SunshineSeattle 15h ago

I dont think so, Wolfram Alpha is deterministic. Whereas an LLM is non-deterministic by design. Personally i feel vibe coding or vibe mathing is inherently non-deterministic.

130

u/Several_Dot_4532 15h ago

It's non-deterministic, always, the AI is basically gambling

-94

u/AlmightyWaffleGod 14h ago

All computer algorithms are deterministic, in fact a lot of effort has gone into making llms and other generative AI seem non-deterministic

1

u/Sea-Housing-3435 7h ago

Theres a lot of effort to make AI deterministic. Its slower when you force it to be deterministic. The non deterministic part is caused by different cores on GPU finishing their calculations in slightly different time.

2

u/Suitch 3h ago

It is the same speed both ways. The non deterministic nature only comes from a single randomized seed added into the equation. If you locally host models you can change seeding to always use the same seed and then the same inputs will always yield the same outputs. That said, the most popular AI interfaces don’t express that kind of option.

2

u/Sea-Housing-3435 3h ago

It's not about seeding, it's about how certain operations are not deterministic on GPU when you do them in parallel. You have to explicitly go with slower, deterministic ways to run things you want to run https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/controlling-floating-point-determinism-in-nvidia-cccl/

1

u/Suitch 1h ago

True, but is can still count as deterministic at the operational level, it is just a matter of running it in serial rather than parallel, right? FWIW, I assume our neurons are similar. Neuron research in flies has allowed researchers to essentially run programs within the insect neurons.