[aradox66]

Also, at temperature 0 LLMs can behave deterministically! Indeterminism isn't necessarily quite the right word for the kind of abstraction LLMs provide

[gpm]

Even at temperature != 0 it's trivial to just use a fixed seed in the RNG... it's just a computer being used in a naive, not even multi threaded (i.e. with race conditions), way.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out different stacks multiple fp16s slightly differently or something. Getting determinism across machines might take some work... but there's really nothing magic going on here.

[bird0861]

Quite pleased you mentioned this. I would like to add transformer LLMs can be turing complete, see the work of Franz Nowak and his colleagues (I think there were at least one or two other papers by other teams but I read Nowak's the closest as it was the latest one when I became aware of this).

[josefx]

That runs into the issue that nobody runs LLMs with a temperature of zero.

[bird0861]

Not true. Perhaps very few do, but some do in fact run them at 0. I've done it myself. There are many small models that will gladly perform well in QA with temp 0. Of course there are few situations where this is the recommended setup -- we all know RAG takes less than a billion parameters now to do effectively. But nevertheless there are people who do this, and there are plausibly some use cases for it.