What does "deterministic silence" even mean here? Genuinely curious before reading.
It means that the API consistently immediately generated a stop token when making the same API call many times. The API call sets the temperature to 0 (the OpenAI documentation is not clear if gpt 5.2 can even have its temperature set to 0) which makes sampling deterministic.
The model reliably outputs nothing when prompted to embody the void.
Anyway later they concede that it's not 100% deterministic, because
> Temperature 0 non-determinism. While all confirmatory results were 30/30, known floating-point non-determinism exists at temperature 0 in both APIs. One control concept (thunder) showed 1/30 void on GPT, demonstrating marginal non-determinism.
Actually FP non-determinism affects runs between different machines giving different output. But in the same machine, FP is fully deterministic. (it can be made to be cross-platform deterministic with some performance penalty in at least some machines)
What makes computers non-deterministic here is concurrency. Concurrent code can interleave differently at each run. However it is possible to build LLMs that are 100% deterministic [0] (you can make them deterministic if those interleavings have the same results), it's just that people generally don't do that.
[0] for example, fabrice bellard's ts_zip https://bellard.org/ts_zip/ uses a llm to compress text. It would not be able to decompress the text losslessly if it weren't fully deterministic