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Claude mixes up who said what

dwyer.co.za

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Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#91
post #85
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then the training data would have to be coloured

I think OpenAI and Anthropic probably have a lot of that lying around by now.

So most training data would be grey and a little bit coloured? Ok, that sounds plausible. But then maybe they tried and the current models get it already right 99.99% of the time, so observing any improvement is very hard.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#92
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is "fundamentally" not true, you can use a preset seed and temperature and get a deterministic output.

I initially thought the same, but apparently with the inaccuracies inherent to floating-point arithmetic and various other such accuracy leakage, it’s not true! https://arxiv.org/html/2408.04667v5

This has nothing to do with FP inaccuracies, and your link does confirm that:

“Although the use of multiple GPUs introduces some randomness (Nvidia, 2024), it can be eliminated by setting random seeds, so that AI models are deterministic given the same input. […] In order to support this line of reasoning, we ran Llama3-8b on our local GPUs without any optimizations, yielding deterministic results. This indicates that the models and GPUs themselves are not the only source of non-determinism.”

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah of course changes in the input result in changes to the output, my only claim was that LLMs can be deterministic (ie to output exactly the same output each time for a given input) if set up correctly.

You don't think this is pedantry bordering on uselessness?

It's correcting a misconception that many people have regarding LLMs that they are inherently and fundamentally non-deterministic, as if they were a true random number generator, but they are closer to a pseudo random number generator in that they are deterministic with the right settings.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is "fundamentally" not true, you can use a preset seed and temperature and get a deterministic output.

A single byte change in the input changes the output. The sentence "Please do this for me" and "Please, do this for me" can lead to completely distinct output. Given this, you can't treat it as deterministic even with temp 0 and fixed seed and no memory.

Interestingly, this is the mathematical definition of "chaotic behaviour"; minuscule changes in the input result in arbitrarily large differences in the output.

It can arise from perfectly deterministic rules... the Logistic Map with r=4, x(n+1) = 4*(1 - x(n)) is a classic.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single byte change in the input changes the output. The sentence "Please do this for me" and "Please, do this for me" can lead to completely distinct output. Given this, you can't treat it as deterministic even with temp 0 and fixed seed and no memory.

Interestingly, this is the mathematical definition of "chaotic behaviour"; minuscule changes in the input result in arbitrarily large differences in the output. It can arise from perfectly deterministic rules... the Logistic Map with r=4, x(n+1) = 4*(1 - x(n)) is a classic.

Correct, it's akin to chaos theory or the butterfly effect, which, even it can be predictable for many ranges of input: https://youtu.be/dtjb2OhEQcU

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single byte change in the input changes the output. The sentence "Please do this for me" and "Please, do this for me" can lead to completely distinct output. Given this, you can't treat it as deterministic even with temp 0 and fixed seed and no memory.

Well yeah of course changes in the input result in changes to the output, my only claim was that LLMs can be deterministic (ie to output exactly the same output each time for a given input) if set up correctly.

You still can’t deterministically guarantee anything about the output based on the input, other than repeatability for the exact same input.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#97
post #85
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because then the training data would have to be coloured

I think OpenAI and Anthropic probably have a lot of that lying around by now.

They have a lot of data in the form: user input, LLM output. Then the model learns what the previous LLM models produced, with all their flaws. The core LLM premise is that it learns from all available human text.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally there's no way to deterministically guarantee anything about the output.

That is "fundamentally" not true, you can use a preset seed and temperature and get a deterministic output.

If you also control the model.

Re: Claude mixes up who said what

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is "fundamentally" not true, you can use a preset seed and temperature and get a deterministic output.

I'll grant that you can guarantee the length of the output and, being a computer program, it's possible (though not always in practice) to rerun and get the same result each time, but that's not guaranteeing anything about said output.

What do you want to guarantee about the output, that it follows a given structure? Unless you map out all inputs and outputs, no it's not possible, but to say that it is a fundamental property of LLMs to be non deterministic is false, which is what I was inferring you meant, perhaps that was not what you implied.
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