LLMs are deterministic. We just sample the results, no? Also, no reason AI needs not be deterministic.

> LLMs are deterministic.

In theory, yes. In practice, parallelism combined with floating point math make current implementations fundamentally non-deterministic.

Can you elaborate more on the parallelism aspect?

Not fundamentally, but extremely costly to keep track of everything. Still deterministic though.

Temperature cannot ever reach 0 (this causes a division error), so they are not deterministic.

Exactly

The point is don't ask an LLM to do tasks that a calculator can do. Ask if to use the calculator, just like most humans would.

The point is that you shouldn't need to ask. If it's actually a general-purpose system it will do it automatically.

An LLM in isolation is not a general purpose system, but with ChatGPT at least, most of the time you don't need to ask. In fact, it's increasingly difficult to force it to do "manual" maths, as it's strongly predisposed to do things like write and evaluate Python code instead of doing it "manually".

E.g. I verified just now and asked it to multiply two huge numbers, and it immediately spat out Python code, then evaluated it and gave me the result, rather than try to add the numbers itself.

It still needs to be trained on what calculators are, on how to use them, and on when it is appropriate to do so. Again, same as humans.

I know. That was my point.