Comment by altcognito 3 days ago
Explain this though. The code is deterministic, even if it relies on pseudo random number generation. It doesn't just happen, someone has to make a conscious decision to force a different code path (or model) if the system is loaded.
There are settings to make it reproducible but they incur a non-negligible drop in performance.
Unsurprising given they amount to explicit synchronization to make the order of operations deterministic.
Not deterministic. https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
For all practical purposes any code reliant on the output of a PRNG is non-deterministic in all but the most pedantic senses... And if the LLM temperature isn't set to 0 LLMs are sampling from a distribution.
If you're going to call a PRNG deterministic then the outcome of a complicated concurrent system with no guaranteed ordering is going to be deterministic too!
Zero temp just uses argmax, which is what softmax approaches if you take the limit of T to zero anyway. So it could very well be deterministic.
Floating point math isn't associative for operations that are associative in normal math.
That would just add up to statistical noise instead of 10% degradation over a week.
Catastrophic error accumulation can produce more profound effects than noise.
Just to make sure I got this right. They serve millions of requests a day & somehow catastrophic error accumulation is what is causing the 10% degradation & no one at Anthropic is noticing it. Is that the theory?
Its not deterministic. Any individual floating point mul/add is deterministic, but in a GPU these are all happening in parallel and the accumulation is in the order they happen to complete.
When you add A then B then C, you get a different answer than C then A then B, because floating point, approximation error, subnormals etc.