alt Hacker NewsPlenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.
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In engineering you have tolerances to deal with non-determinism. ”Within these bounds” and ”given these assumptions then…” is the foundation of building something _on top of_ those things. LLMs are the same, it relies on heavily exact Turing machines as input but its output is entirely unstable. Even if you can get determinism it will never get anything resembling ”bounds” out of the box. That makes it a poor foundation for building on top of. Ie it’s not a screwdriver, it’s the monkey who’s holding it.
I do not understand the need to argue that monkeys are better than screwdrivers at screwing. Just let the monkey be the best version of a monkey.
I think it's safe to say that computing should be mostly deterministic. I know compilers use heuristics that are stochastic, but come on. Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time... That's not an abstraction, it's random programming.
There's a pretty cool article about trying to understand electronics and fix a radio the way we try to understand biology. https://mappingignorance.org/2014/07/02/biologists-cant-unde...
So now instead of improving the tools of biology so we can actually understand it deeply - we increase complexity of IT so we have to rely on muddy, side-effecty tools of biology to try to infer some of the properties of the systems we made. That's depressing.
Our ancestors also had an infant mortality ratio of 4/10.
Determinism is way undervalued.
There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism. Only the former can be statistically modeled to characterize and work around the noise with any reliability. If you measure hallucination rate for one prompt it tells you nothing about hallucination rate for another prompt.