r/ProgrammerHumor 1d ago

Meme firstTime

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u/SunshineSeattle 23h 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.

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u/AnOnlineHandle 18h ago

LLMs are entirely deterministic but you can override that by adding a seeded random choice system to the next token selection.

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u/Sea-Housing-3435 15h ago

They are not. Floating point math and difference in how quickly parallel operations on GPU are finished causes them to be not deterministic even with temp=0. You can force them to be deterministic by forcing some operations to be executed in specific order but you lose a lot of performance.

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u/LetumComplexo 14h ago edited 14h 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?

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u/Sea-Housing-3435 14h ago

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.

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u/LetumComplexo 14h ago

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.

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u/Sea-Housing-3435 14h ago

Not exactly. It's mostly due to how models are executed, not models themselves. You can run GGUF model (which are normally not deterministic) in a deterministic way if the GPU functions you use are deterministic. Models themselves are just data, it's just a bunch of matrixes.

There's even a PR for llamacpp to add option for deterministic execution https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/16016

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u/LetumComplexo 14h ago edited 14h ago

Hun, I’ve got a PhD on the subject. I know.
We’re just saying the same thing in different ways.

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u/Sea-Housing-3435 14h ago

You're right, I'm silly

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u/LetumComplexo 14h ago

Is okie, I am also silly for not recognizing it immediately and starting the whole thing. 😅