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Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

(simonwillison.net)
724 points simonw | 1 comments | 11 Jul 25 00:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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xnx ◴[11 Jul 25 00:34 UTC] No.44527256[source]▶
> It’s worth noting that LLMs are non-deterministic,

This is probably better phrased as "LLMs may not provide consistent answers due to changing data and built-in randomness."

Barring rare(?) GPU race conditions, LLMs produce the same output given the same inputs.

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troupo ◴[11 Jul 25 06:13 UTC] No.44528870[source]▶
> Barring rare(?) GPU race conditions, LLMs produce the same output given the same inputs.

Are these LLMs in the room with us?

Not a single LLM available as a SaaS is deterministic.

As for other models: I've only run ollama locally, and it, too, provided different answers for the same question five minutes apart

Edit/update: not a single LLM available as a SaaS's output is deterministic, especially when used from a UI. Pointing out that you could probably run a tightly controlled model in a tightly controlled environment to achieve deterministic output is very extremely irrelevant when describing output of grok in situations when the user has no control over it

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1. DemocracyFTW2 ◴[11 Jul 25 06:28 UTC] No.44528952[source]▶
Akchally... Strictly speaking and to the best of my understanding, LLMs are deterministic in the sense that a dice roll is deterministic; the randomness comes from insufficient knowledge about its internal state. But use a constant seed and run the model with the same sequence of questions, you will get the same answers. It's possible that the interactions with other users who use the model in parallel could influence the outcome, but given that the state-of-the-art technique to provide memory and context is to re-submit the entirety of the current chat I'd doubt that. One hint that what I surmise is in fact true can be gleaned from those text-to-image generators that allow seeds to be set; you still don't get a 'linear', predictable (but hopefully a somewhat-sensible) relation between prompt to output, but each (seed, prompt) pair will always give the same sequence of images.