• hperrin@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      LLMs won’t spit out the same word-for-word response for the same prompt

      You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.

      • anothermember@feddit.uk
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        5 hours ago

        You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.

        You’re assuming that because I missed out that detail I must be ignorant of it, that’s not very charitable, I could well have been ignorant of it but you could have made your otherwise useful clarification without telling me I was wrong.

        • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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          5 hours ago

          You said “that’s not how they work”. But that is how they work. Same prompt = same output. Throw some random data in there to jumble things around and you get a little variance. That’s the seed, and we only need to do that because LLMs are inherently deterministic.

          Same reason Minecraft has a random seed for world generation, and block cipher algorithms use an initialization vector and/or feedback loop. We don’t want the same thing every time.

          I did say that you’re right, because the tooling we use around the LLM itself does exactly what you’re talking about. So, in practice, you’re right.

          • anothermember@feddit.uk
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            5 hours ago

            Again, you’re telling me what I already know, because you’re still assuming. I can make the point that same prompts don’t produce the same output without explaining about random seeds.

            • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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              5 hours ago

              I honestly wasn’t trying to attack you. I think we should be careful when we talk about LLMs, because it’s important for people to know that it’s just a bunch of math in a computer program. A lot of people have a tendency to anthropomorphize it.

      • timochka@lemmy.zip
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        6 hours ago

        So your hyopthesis is that instead of a load of people cutting and pasting the same response (AI generated or otherwise,) they all cut and pasted the exact same prompt into exactly the same model with exactly the same context running on exactly the same hardware, and went to the trouble of also fixing the same seed?

        That certainly seems the simpler explanation.

        • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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          6 hours ago

          How did you possibly get that from what I said? Are you purposefully being as uncharitable as possible?

          No, I clearly was not talking about this situation. I was clarifying how your interpretation was correct, but you were factually incorrect.

          • timochka@lemmy.zip
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            6 hours ago

            Not my interpretation.

            And what you were doing was “well, akshuallying”. Own it.

            • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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              5 hours ago

              It’s called pedantry, and I have never failed to own it. At this point, I feel like you’re trying to be overly abrasive.

              Was it not your interpretation that the messages seem to not be from LLMs, because they’re identical? Because that’s literally what you said.

                • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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                  5 hours ago

                  Fair enough. Still, why would you misrepresent my view so radically unless you were being uncharitable on purpose?

                  • timochka@lemmy.zip
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                    5 hours ago

                    Because being pedantic just to try and make yourself feel superior to someone who was posting in good faith is obnoxious behaviour that deserves to be called out. You knew exactly what they meant, but thought you’d truth-bomb your way in for what, exactly? You did nothing to actually address their point - that the messages being identical is prima facie evidence that (original AI generated or not) it was probably candidates copy-and-pasting a standard form response, which could (and was) be done long before LLMs were a thing - and instead just added “look how clever I am”.

                    Dick behaviour doesn’t deserve a charitable response.