Non-deterministic means random - that's the definition of the word. The weather forecast is also random - in fact, weather forecast is (if you simplify it too much) an average of several predictive (generative) models.
> Non-deterministic means random - that's the definition of the word.
That's not really the defintion. Non-determinism just means the outcome is not a pure function of the inputs. A PRNG doesn't become truly random just because we don't know the state and seed when calling the function and the same holds for LLMs. The non-determinism in LLMs comes from accepted race conditions in the GPU floating point math and the PRNG in the sampler.
That's besides the point, but we could have perfectly deterministic LLMs.
If you ask it what a star is, it’s never going to tell you it’s a giant piece of cheese floating in the the sky.
If you don’t believe me, try it, write a for loop which asks ChatGPT, what is a star (astronomy) exactly? Ask it 1000 times and then tell me how random it is versus how consistent it is.
The idea that non deterministic === random is totally deluded. It just means you cannot predict the exact tokens which will be produced but it doesn’t mean it’s random like a random number generator and it could be any thing.
If you ask what is Michael Jackson the entertainer famous for it’s going to tell you he’s famous for music and dancing. 1000/1000 times, is that random?
> If you ask it what a star is, it’s never going to tell you it’s a giant piece of cheese floating in the the sky.
Turn the Top-P and the temperature up. Turning up the Top-P will enable the LLM to actually produce such nonsense. Turning up the temperature will increase the chance that such nonsense is actually selected for the prediction (output).
I'm talking about the standard settings, and infact GPT-5 doesn't let you change the temperature anymore.
Also, that's not really the point. Humans can also produce nonsense if you torture them until they're talking nonsense, but that doesn't mean humans are "random."
LLMs are not random, they are non-deterministic, but the two words have different meanings.
Random means you cannot tell what is going to be produced at all, i.e. a random number generator.
But if you ask an LLM, is an Apple a fruit, answer yes or no only, the LLM is going to answer yes, 100% of the time. That isn't random.
