Nondeterminism's Not the Problem
8 hours ago
- #LLMs
- #Semantics
- #Nondeterminism
- Nondeterminism is often blamed for issues with LLMs when they are compared to compilers, but this is a misunderstanding.
- LLMs can be made deterministic (e.g., by setting temperature to 0 or using a seed), and compilers can be made nondeterministic, yet the core issues persist.
- The real problem is that programming languages have defined semantics (like the Java Language Specification), while prompts lack semantics, making LLM outputs unreliable without inspection.
- Adding semantics to prompts would reduce the flexibility of LLMs and reintroduce manual coding, without solving the trust issue as LLMs cannot guarantee correct implementation like compilers do.
- Determinism is irrelevant to the reliability of LLMs; even deterministic LLMs are untrustworthy due to the lack of semantic guarantees in prompts.