this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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You're correct that a collection of deterministic elements will produce a deterministic result.
LLMs produce a probability distribution of next tokens and then randomly select one of them. That's where the non-determinism enters the system. Even if you set the temperature to 0 you're going to get some randomness. The GPU can round two different real numbers to the same floating point representation. When that happens, it's a hardware-level coin toss on which token gets selected.
You can test this empirically. Set the temperature to 0 and ask it, "give me a random number". You'll rarely get the same number twice in a row, no matter how similar you try to make the starting conditions.