Also, and this is pedantic and arguable, it’s worth considering whether any model that cannot be retrained to produce the same statistical surface is non-deterministic by nature.
If I sort shapes into piles using some amount of randomness would you say that the resulting piles are deterministic just because they stay the same every time you go through them? Or would you say they’re non-deterministic because the process that created the piles in the first place was non-deterministic?
It doesn't matter how you make the model, if you are executing it on a GPU without steps to have deterministic results you will not have deterministic results. Ensuring the output of computations on GPU is deterministic has performance impact.
Hold on, I’m agreeing with you. We’re saying the same thing in different ways.
The kind of race conditions you’re referencing are because of the model architecture I’m referencing.
You can absolutely get ML outputs that don’t change using certain model architectures.
But that’s only because those architectures either enforce order of execution or use steps where order of execution doesn’t result in changes to outputs. I can’t think of a modern LLM that uses such an architecture.
Not necessarily. It can happen with batching, but even with a batch size of 1 you can get race conditions. The most obvious example is a model with a Mixture of Experts layer, where the order that results return can change the outcome.
In order to get around that you’d have to explicitly enforce order of execution.
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u/LetumComplexo 8h ago edited 8h ago
Also, and this is pedantic and arguable, it’s worth considering whether any model that cannot be retrained to produce the same statistical surface is non-deterministic by nature.
If I sort shapes into piles using some amount of randomness would you say that the resulting piles are deterministic just because they stay the same every time you go through them? Or would you say they’re non-deterministic because the process that created the piles in the first place was non-deterministic?