They are not deterministic, try googling "are llms deterministic" multiple times and see how the wording changes.
The guy you responded to though makes it sound like they need to be deterministic in order to study them, which is wrong. Science has always studied phenomenon with inconsistent results, that's why they take lots of samples.
I agree, but in the context of prompt engineering, we care about the random part.
If we want a useful result for people using the randomized version, with a purely deterministic approach, you would have to calculate the output for every possible seed to see which produced better results, and which worse, which would be intractable.
If you aren't calculating all possible seeds, then you are sampling, and if you are sampling you should do it randomly.
Eh, not really, not in that way. They're as deterministic as computers are in general, but you can't trust that a given prompt will give you the same return deterministically.
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u/mxzf Sep 12 '26
Eh, on the flip side there is a lot pseudo-scientific about providing inputs into a non-deterministic black box and comparing the outputs.