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Comment by efficax

llms are not strictly deterministic in the sense that even if you had the RNG state, context, and prompt you would likely not get an identical output even if there was no other randomness involved, because the concurrent scheduling of the massive amounts of floating point calculations can produce different results, since floating point arithmetic is not truly associative [(a+b)+c can differ from a+(b+c)] and the order in which these operations happen can result in subtly different final tensors. To reproduce it deterministically you'd have to also reproduce the exact scheduling of all matrix calculations among all the GPU cores (across different physical gpus!) that it took place on, which afaik is currently impossible.
parent efficax 2 months ago

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