alt Hacker NewsWhile I agree with you, I think it's diverging from the initial point.
The original take was "LLMs are very much like playing an instrument". I think they are very much NOT like playing an instrument.
While different musicians will produce different results, one musician won't get drastically different results on different days or when trying a different "copy" of the same instrument. If you can play the violin on your violin and I lend you my violin, you will still be able to play very consistently. You may argue that the sound will differ and you will have to adapt slightly, but that's not remotely similar to the randomness coming from LLMs.
Will you?
That's only if both violins are tuned the same way, and one must continually tune them lest they get out of sync.
Similarly, an LLM can be extremely consistent if tuned properly -- indeed, if you fix the weights and settings, they can be made "essentially deterministic" for many prompts!