3 ms·

My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature th

My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. As a sidenote, it amuses me that this author specifically calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess), it's funny to me that it should be asserted as a prime directive for computing. Determinism is certainly a useful property where you can get it, but there's a whole lot of useful systems where you can't get it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dns_snek 2y ago
> calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess) With all that grandstanding you've missed the author's point because temperature doesn't make them deterministic in any way that matters in the real world. It only makes their output deterministic for the exact sequence of input tokens (I've yet to see an application where this would be useful, just save the result if you want the exact same one!), but it doesn't make them deterministic for a different but semantically equivalent sequence of tokens, which is the core value proposition of LLMs. The answer to "How tall is the Eiffel tower?" shouldn't change based on whether I also add "and where is its nearest bakery?", but with more complex questions, that's what often happens.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  exactly, and you can graphically watch the effect in image generators that do not only behave, in my experience, in a non-deterministic way, but chaotically in the sense that any small change to the input prompt can cause arbitrary changes in the output picture
zkry 2y ago
> My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. That's an awfully patronizing way of putting things. The coming years can be hard for anyone for a number of reasons: geopolitical conflict, economic depression, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. I doubt that harboring negative views towards the current usage of LLMs will make a difference.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dns_snek 2y ago

> calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess) With all that grandstanding you've missed the author's point because temperature doesn't make them deterministic in any way that matters in the real world. It only makes their output deterministic for the exact sequence of input tokens (I've yet to see an application where this would be useful, just save the result if you want the exact same one!), but it doesn't make them deterministic for a different but semantically equivalent sequence of tokens, which is the core value proposition of LLMs. The answer to "How tall is the Eiffel tower?" shouldn't change based on whether I also add "and where is its nearest bakery?", but with more complex questions, that's what often happens.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
exactly, and you can graphically watch the effect in image generators that do not only behave, in my experience, in a non-deterministic way, but chaotically in the sense that any small change to the input prompt can cause arbitrary changes in the output picture

zkry 2y ago

> My natural instinct when I encounter this kind of person is to lavish scorn on them, but I have to hold myself back from that. Partly because it's the mature thing to do, and partly because the coming years will be hard enough on them anyway. That's an awfully patronizing way of putting things. The coming years can be hard for anyone for a number of reasons: geopolitical conflict, economic depression, natural disasters, pandemics, etc. I doubt that harboring negative views towards the current usage of LLMs will make a difference.