19 ms·

Determinism is a terrifying word to people who want to believe their LLM has a little brain and can do anything they want it to.

by devmor 1mo ago

LovelyButterfly 1mo ago
I've been struggling a lot to understand this ever since the agents thing entered the hype. If I follow a path of requirements, it always comes down to: But why you'll leave the decision to a stochastic tool, when you should a have deterministic approach? It's software god damn it... the reason why people moved from analog to digital is because you can repetitively execute functions that do always the same thing and it's 0 when it's 0, 1 when its 1. All the sudden everyone is ok on burning trees to have their cool probabilistic tool named agent to do: maybe it's 0, but it can also be 1, let me "think"... ah yes, for sure it's 2. The sad part for me is that management people have their heads so much into this hype, that no attack on privacy matters (almost none actually ever did, I know). Only when they suffer a huge blow in terms of revenue or reputation is that they maybe, maaaybe, find will want to listen again the experts.
- brabel 1mo ago
  Are you saying you would prefer a perfectly deterministic code writer? So, humans shouldn’t write any code anymore?!
monster_truck 1mo ago
A wild number of people who present themselves as knowledgeable or even experts on the subject either have no idea or worse, do not believe that it is possible to ie set a static seed value and send the same prompt across multiple fresh contexts and get the same result* It's genuinely a little concerning. It does not help that many of them are gaslighting themselves into thinking these things are benchmark crushing elite hackers by running effectively unsecured, unfiltered, unlogged production environments. *Obviously this also means a temperature of >0 to avoid the greedy trap, the same generation params, on the same software, hardware, drivers etc etc
- devmor 1mo ago
  My personal opinion is that this is the state of so-called experts in most scientific or engineering fields at their inception - it takes a fair bit of time for the ecosystem to filter out and players to get an intrinsic feel for how "full of it" others are. I also believe that due to the sycophantic nature of popular LLMs, people tend to fool themselves more than usual by having a digital "yes man".

Determinism is a terrifying word to people who want to believe their LLM has a little brain and can do anything they want it to.

by devmor 1mo ago

Determinism is a terrifying word to people who want to believe their LLM has a little brain and can do anything they want it to.

LovelyButterfly 1mo ago

I've been struggling a lot to understand this ever since the agents thing entered the hype. If I follow a path of requirements, it always comes down to: But why you'll leave the decision to a stochastic tool, when you should a have deterministic approach? It's software god damn it... the reason why people moved from analog to digital is because you can repetitively execute functions that do always the same thing and it's 0 when it's 0, 1 when its 1. All the sudden everyone is ok on burning trees to have their cool probabilistic tool named agent to do: maybe it's 0, but it can also be 1, let me "think"... ah yes, for sure it's 2. The sad part for me is that management people have their heads so much into this hype, that no attack on privacy matters (almost none actually ever did, I know). Only when they suffer a huge blow in terms of revenue or reputation is that they maybe, maaaybe, find will want to listen again the experts.

brabel 1mo ago
Are you saying you would prefer a perfectly deterministic code writer? So, humans shouldn’t write any code anymore?!

monster_truck 1mo ago

A wild number of people who present themselves as knowledgeable or even experts on the subject either have no idea or worse, do not believe that it is possible to ie set a static seed value and send the same prompt across multiple fresh contexts and get the same result* It's genuinely a little concerning. It does not help that many of them are gaslighting themselves into thinking these things are benchmark crushing elite hackers by running effectively unsecured, unfiltered, unlogged production environments. *Obviously this also means a temperature of >0 to avoid the greedy trap, the same generation params, on the same software, hardware, drivers etc etc

devmor 1mo ago
My personal opinion is that this is the state of so-called experts in most scientific or engineering fields at their inception - it takes a fair bit of time for the ecosystem to filter out and players to get an intrinsic feel for how "full of it" others are. I also believe that due to the sycophantic nature of popular LLMs, people tend to fool themselves more than usual by having a digital "yes man".