alt Hacker NewsThis is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However:
Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness.
A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0].
The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
Replies
The economics of it (token cost) means, however, that what will be chosen most often is the barely sustainable minimum level of quality, aka race to the bottom. AI is more cost-sensitive in that way than humans caring or not caring about making things robust and correct used to be.
A Las Vegas algorithm requires that you have a deterministic test that can definitively determine the correctness of an intermediate result. So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. Well, if the human is there, why not just ask the human? What value is the random number generator adding?
Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results, without doing any checking. Solved problems stay solved.