3 ms·
As a human, in the photo of that sandwich I see 4 slices of bread and 4 slices of cheese (distributed unevenly). I have no idea about the weight of the bread, f
by ozgung 6mo ago
As a human, in the photo of that sandwich I see 4 slices of bread and 4 slices of cheese (distributed unevenly). I have no idea about the weight of the bread, flour type or its sugar content. I don't know the type of the cheese, dimensions of the slices or total amount of cheese inside the bread. I don't know if there is butter or anything else inside. I can guess the size of the plate as a size reference but I can't be sure. Human or AI, it's an ill-posed problem. There can be widely different estimates which can be equally plausible.
- bcjdjsndon 6mo agoBut why would the same llm give you wildly different answers EACH TIME you ask?
- zdragnar 6mo agoBecause that's how they work? They aren't knowledge machines, they are random generators.
- bcjdjsndon 6mo agoThey're next word predictors. They explicitly add in randomness at various stages of the transformer itself, otherwise it'd be too obvious it's not actually intelligent and just a next word predictor
- pertymcpert 6mo agoNo that's not why.
- pkaye 6mo agoThere is a parameter in LLMs called temperature that controls creativity/randomness. If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic. I think some LLMs expose this as a tunable parameter.
- muwtyhg 6mo agoThe study used a temperature of 0.01. > "Thirteen food photographs were each submitted 495–561 times to four LLM vision APIs (GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview) using an identical structured prompt adapted from the iAPS automated insulin delivery system (26,904 total queries, temperature 0.01)"
- jihadjihad 6mo ago> If you set it to 0 it makes the model deterministic. No, it doesn't. It can help make the model more deterministic, but it does not guarantee it.
- azakai 6mo agoThe hardware can also add nondeterminism. GPUs reorder operations, leading to different results. Vendors might also be running A/B testing or who knows what, even when you ask for a temperature of 0. But, if you run a fixed model with temperature 0 on your local CPU, it will be deterministic (unless there are bugs).