5 ms·

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way. A conscious machine that always answer the ve

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way. A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too". I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not. Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.

antx 10d ago
Out of curiosity, which models are fully deterministic? I was under the impression that all LLMs were fundamentally probabilistic.
- Wowfunhappy 10d ago
  The randomness is something we add on purpose; you can set an LLM's "temperature" to 0 to get deterministic output. This tends to make the quality of its responses worse for reasons I don't think anyone really understands, but it's still functional. I don't think the state of the art LLM providers let you do this anymore (?), but they certainly could if they wanted to, and you can do it yourself with a local model.
  - antx 10d ago
    Setting the temperature to 0 mathematically tells the system to always choose the absolute highest-probability word (known as "greedy decoding"), but in no reality is this "deterministic". Output drift is still a thing.
    - Wowfunhappy 10d ago
      But that's from, like, floating point errors, right? If you used higher precision that wouldn't happen, it's just because we're cheap in how we do rounding. I can see how you'd nitpick this, but to me this is a deterministic algorithm that just happens to be running on nondeterministic hardware.
      - pixl97 10d ago
        I mean, currently we'd have some difficultly proving our hardware isn't deterministic, just that we can't actually test it. But, I think you're tricking yourself on determinism. You'll say something like "I know if I ask an LLM what 1+1 is, it will answer 2", but the thing is, you don't. You have to run the LLM first to figure out it's output. And when you send in just a few bits of text, it's outputs are going to be rather limited. But this all breaks when it hits the real world. Inputs are unpredictable. Hence while LLM outputs, like humans, are probabilistic, you can't figure out what it's going to be until you ask. And in any high complexity data gathering environment you're going have a difficult time ensuring your entire systems conditions are the same. System consistency is very hard, once you start running thousands of processors in an agentic loop small errors accrue and timing starts differing and the system will take non-deterministic paths.
        throwaway63486 10d ago
        I think you're arguing a different thing than determinism. If I ask an llm to "add 2 and 2" is and it replies corectly, then I ask for "the sum of 2 and 2" and it replies "banana" that is a lack of predictability and consistency but not a lack of determinism. As long as it produces the same output for a given input, unhinged or not, it is deterministic. Your example at the end of different systems feeding data to each other is non-deterministic only at the system level, not the individual llm level.
        pixl97 9d ago
        >only at the system level, not the individual llm level. Which is why llms aren't agents and depend on harnesses. The llm itself doesn't have a continual loop built in, that would be very power hungry. The harness works as the orchestrator of memory and action. Now, I can't think of a reason why an LLM couldn't bootstrap its own harness, but in general it sounds like a very dumb idea to actually build that from an AI safety perspective. This discussion falls under the idea and refutation of the Chinese Room. The room may have no idea what Chinese characters are, but the system does.
  - mitxela 9d ago
    You can also use a seeded random generator to get the same random numbers each time
- piker 10d ago
  Same weights, same seed, same input tokens, same algorithm, same output tokens, probabilistic or not. Quantum effects have been de-noised, but I guess there are still random gamma rays.
- qarl 10d ago
  Naw - computers are really deterministic. It's hard to get them to behave otherwise. As I understand it, if you turn down the temperature to 0 you get repeatable behavior - EXCEPT - on large servers with lots of users - the GPU can sometimes produce slightly different results based on batch size.
  - joe_the_user 10d ago
    Unless you have something exotic, the randomness that's adding to a computer is a combination of how it's configured combined with a pseudo-random number generator. I assume the system adds entropy to the generator regularly but all you need to do is fix the various supposedly random inputs and you can get full determinism even without zero temperature.
    - qarl 10d ago
      Yes, in theory, of course. In practice - on a multitasking OS with input from multiple human users - it's hard to get it deterministic because of that GPU scheduling thing I mentioned.
      - fc417fc802 10d ago
        GPU scheduling only affects the result due to buggy optimizations. It's the exact same mechanism as fp rounding error on the CPU or updates to globally shared PRNG state. We use lots of buggy optimizations because they don't matter in practice in most situations (see ex -ffast-math).
        qarl 10d ago
        I don't know the details but apparently it has something to do with multiprocess contention for the GPU and batch sizing.
        fc417fc802 9d ago
        Right but regardless, it's a buggy optimization. The calculations are all fully deterministic when done "properly" and fully consistently but we almost never bother with that because it slows things down and the errors don't matter in practice 99% of the time.
- SkyBelow 10d ago
  By default they are matrix multiplications. Temperature is added in as forced PRNG because testing found that correlated with better outputs. Given the same prompts and the same weights, one can get the same answer each time. In practice, there are a number of optimizations that makes the results dependent upon thing we give up control of to increase performance, meaning the results end up being effectively non-deterministic. But, if you are willing to run it in a slower mode so we don't do some steps out of order to speed things up and don't batch results (or if you consider the determinism of a given batch of requests rather than individual requests), then the same input gets the same output.
qarl 10d ago
> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". You'll need to explain why.
- 5eueuur 10d ago
  it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird
  - qarl 10d ago
    It doesn't seem self evident to me, no. I suspect the reasoning is connected to free will vs. determinism. But no, I see no inconsistency. You'll have to actually point it out.
  - SkyBelow 10d ago
    The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
    - loopies 10d ago
      >and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices. Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another. I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted. Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.
joe_the_user 10d ago
The idea that determinism and consciousness are incompatible is deeply intuitive to many people. And many other embrace it - you can trace this back to the debates for and against Calvinism. A lot comes down to the way people parse causation and choice. You don't want to say that a murderer was completely caused to choose something because then you can't hold the person responsible. And so determined consciousness makes people unhappy. But just as much, if the opposite of determinism is hard statistical randomness, how do say that "is the essence of personhood". This is why physicist go out in the world trying to find consciousness as a fifth physical force. I mean, think consciousness is a term that ever have a non-contradictory meaning since it's primarily used to bound ethical human worlds and the verifiable formulations of biological and physical systems. But it's going to be with us for a while and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
- qarl 10d ago
  I think this debate is rooted in our instinctual beliefs about fairness. An organism in a social group needs to decide how to react to the brutish behavior of its peers. And so Mother Nature has encoded a good strategy in our brains. But this only means the strategy is practical - it doesn't mean it's consistent. I think "responsibility" falls into this category. So we have strong intuitions about it that don't quite logically work. And this is where free will and determinism and choice and punishment all crash together.
- Kim_Bruning 10d ago
  You know, the one really interesting dynamic domain is chaotic, which is a subdomain of the deterministic! I figure free will is a chaotic phenomenon. Groundhog day is your intuition pump here. Go back in time and most assume that the day will go mostly the same, except for the butterfly effect if you change something. Given exactly the same conditions (we went back in time, so that's pretty exact), people will make the same decisions. Most people don't assume that the day will be completely different the next time loop. The town won't suddenly spontaneously all start breakdancing or standing on their heads. (Edit: The murderer is the one who -given the same/similar conditions- will murder again. I'd politely suggest maybe we put them behind bars as a precaution against that; until/unless they learn to act differently. ) (Edit 2: Throw in stochasticity and this actually tends to smooth out chaotic systems. This is counter-intuitive! People's brains break on Evolution in the same way. Meanwhile somehow folks intuit birdshot without difficulty; which is weird!)
fc417fc802 10d ago
> I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not. That seems exceptionally arbitrary. What basis do you have on which to classify them? Are you not conflating the perception of free will with ... what was the definition for it again anyway? Are you able to construct a satisfactory one that meshes with physics? I certainly haven't been able to.

antx 10d ago

Out of curiosity, which models are fully deterministic? I was under the impression that all LLMs were fundamentally probabilistic.

Wowfunhappy 10d ago
The randomness is something we add on purpose; you can set an LLM's "temperature" to 0 to get deterministic output. This tends to make the quality of its responses worse for reasons I don't think anyone really understands, but it's still functional. I don't think the state of the art LLM providers let you do this anymore (?), but they certainly could if they wanted to, and you can do it yourself with a local model.
- antx 10d ago
  Setting the temperature to 0 mathematically tells the system to always choose the absolute highest-probability word (known as "greedy decoding"), but in no reality is this "deterministic". Output drift is still a thing.
  - Wowfunhappy 10d ago
    But that's from, like, floating point errors, right? If you used higher precision that wouldn't happen, it's just because we're cheap in how we do rounding. I can see how you'd nitpick this, but to me this is a deterministic algorithm that just happens to be running on nondeterministic hardware.
    - pixl97 10d ago
      I mean, currently we'd have some difficultly proving our hardware isn't deterministic, just that we can't actually test it. But, I think you're tricking yourself on determinism. You'll say something like "I know if I ask an LLM what 1+1 is, it will answer 2", but the thing is, you don't. You have to run the LLM first to figure out it's output. And when you send in just a few bits of text, it's outputs are going to be rather limited. But this all breaks when it hits the real world. Inputs are unpredictable. Hence while LLM outputs, like humans, are probabilistic, you can't figure out what it's going to be until you ask. And in any high complexity data gathering environment you're going have a difficult time ensuring your entire systems conditions are the same. System consistency is very hard, once you start running thousands of processors in an agentic loop small errors accrue and timing starts differing and the system will take non-deterministic paths.
      - throwaway63486 10d ago
        I think you're arguing a different thing than determinism. If I ask an llm to "add 2 and 2" is and it replies corectly, then I ask for "the sum of 2 and 2" and it replies "banana" that is a lack of predictability and consistency but not a lack of determinism. As long as it produces the same output for a given input, unhinged or not, it is deterministic. Your example at the end of different systems feeding data to each other is non-deterministic only at the system level, not the individual llm level.
        pixl97 9d ago
        >only at the system level, not the individual llm level. Which is why llms aren't agents and depend on harnesses. The llm itself doesn't have a continual loop built in, that would be very power hungry. The harness works as the orchestrator of memory and action. Now, I can't think of a reason why an LLM couldn't bootstrap its own harness, but in general it sounds like a very dumb idea to actually build that from an AI safety perspective. This discussion falls under the idea and refutation of the Chinese Room. The room may have no idea what Chinese characters are, but the system does.
- mitxela 9d ago
  You can also use a seeded random generator to get the same random numbers each time
piker 10d ago
Same weights, same seed, same input tokens, same algorithm, same output tokens, probabilistic or not. Quantum effects have been de-noised, but I guess there are still random gamma rays.
qarl 10d ago
Naw - computers are really deterministic. It's hard to get them to behave otherwise. As I understand it, if you turn down the temperature to 0 you get repeatable behavior - EXCEPT - on large servers with lots of users - the GPU can sometimes produce slightly different results based on batch size.
- joe_the_user 10d ago
  Unless you have something exotic, the randomness that's adding to a computer is a combination of how it's configured combined with a pseudo-random number generator. I assume the system adds entropy to the generator regularly but all you need to do is fix the various supposedly random inputs and you can get full determinism even without zero temperature.
  - qarl 10d ago
    Yes, in theory, of course. In practice - on a multitasking OS with input from multiple human users - it's hard to get it deterministic because of that GPU scheduling thing I mentioned.
    - fc417fc802 10d ago
      GPU scheduling only affects the result due to buggy optimizations. It's the exact same mechanism as fp rounding error on the CPU or updates to globally shared PRNG state. We use lots of buggy optimizations because they don't matter in practice in most situations (see ex -ffast-math).
      - qarl 10d ago
        I don't know the details but apparently it has something to do with multiprocess contention for the GPU and batch sizing.
        fc417fc802 9d ago
        Right but regardless, it's a buggy optimization. The calculations are all fully deterministic when done "properly" and fully consistently but we almost never bother with that because it slows things down and the errors don't matter in practice 99% of the time.
SkyBelow 10d ago
By default they are matrix multiplications. Temperature is added in as forced PRNG because testing found that correlated with better outputs. Given the same prompts and the same weights, one can get the same answer each time. In practice, there are a number of optimizations that makes the results dependent upon thing we give up control of to increase performance, meaning the results end up being effectively non-deterministic. But, if you are willing to run it in a slower mode so we don't do some steps out of order to speed things up and don't batch results (or if you consider the determinism of a given batch of requests rather than individual requests), then the same input gets the same output.

qarl 10d ago

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". You'll need to explain why.

5eueuur 10d ago
it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird
- qarl 10d ago
  It doesn't seem self evident to me, no. I suspect the reasoning is connected to free will vs. determinism. But no, I see no inconsistency. You'll have to actually point it out.
- SkyBelow 10d ago
  The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
  - loopies 10d ago
    >and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices. Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another. I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted. Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.

joe_the_user 10d ago

The idea that determinism and consciousness are incompatible is deeply intuitive to many people. And many other embrace it - you can trace this back to the debates for and against Calvinism. A lot comes down to the way people parse causation and choice. You don't want to say that a murderer was completely caused to choose something because then you can't hold the person responsible. And so determined consciousness makes people unhappy. But just as much, if the opposite of determinism is hard statistical randomness, how do say that "is the essence of personhood". This is why physicist go out in the world trying to find consciousness as a fifth physical force. I mean, think consciousness is a term that ever have a non-contradictory meaning since it's primarily used to bound ethical human worlds and the verifiable formulations of biological and physical systems. But it's going to be with us for a while and I'm not sure what can be done about it.

qarl 10d ago
I think this debate is rooted in our instinctual beliefs about fairness. An organism in a social group needs to decide how to react to the brutish behavior of its peers. And so Mother Nature has encoded a good strategy in our brains. But this only means the strategy is practical - it doesn't mean it's consistent. I think "responsibility" falls into this category. So we have strong intuitions about it that don't quite logically work. And this is where free will and determinism and choice and punishment all crash together.
Kim_Bruning 10d ago
You know, the one really interesting dynamic domain is chaotic, which is a subdomain of the deterministic! I figure free will is a chaotic phenomenon. Groundhog day is your intuition pump here. Go back in time and most assume that the day will go mostly the same, except for the butterfly effect if you change something. Given exactly the same conditions (we went back in time, so that's pretty exact), people will make the same decisions. Most people don't assume that the day will be completely different the next time loop. The town won't suddenly spontaneously all start breakdancing or standing on their heads. (Edit: The murderer is the one who -given the same/similar conditions- will murder again. I'd politely suggest maybe we put them behind bars as a precaution against that; until/unless they learn to act differently. ) (Edit 2: Throw in stochasticity and this actually tends to smooth out chaotic systems. This is counter-intuitive! People's brains break on Evolution in the same way. Meanwhile somehow folks intuit birdshot without difficulty; which is weird!)

fc417fc802 10d ago

> I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not. That seems exceptionally arbitrary. What basis do you have on which to classify them? Are you not conflating the perception of free will with ... what was the definition for it again anyway? Are you able to construct a satisfactory one that meshes with physics? I certainly haven't been able to.