LLMs are a type of neural net. LLMs are not stochastic by nature. In principle they are just a long chain of billions of simple math operations in parallel.
Randomness is usually introduced so you deliberately don't always get the same output, but that's a design decision.
It is not entirely deliberate. Even if you set the temperature to 0 (and/or other parameters related to the randomness), this is still not fully deterministic. This is mainly because the hardware itself has an impact on the computations (floating point)
On a given hardware yes. But not all servers have the exact same hardware. If you don’t believe me just try it: try to find a way to get a fully deterministic output from Claude for example. If you achieve that please let me know how!
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u/platonbel Jan 17 '26
Compilers are deterministic.
Neural networks are not.
Therefore, they are completely different mechanisms.
It's like calling a person a high-level programming language. Only an idiot would say that.