alt Hacker News>An LLM is just as deterministic as any other computer program. For identical inputs (which includes the PRNG seed) it produces identical outputs.
This is not really true in practice because of multi-threading and out-of-order execution. Mathematically equivalent orderings of operations are not equivalent when dealing with floating point values, so most practical LLM implementations end up being non-deterministic.
"An LLM is just as deterministic as any other computer program" is not refuted by pointing out hardware limitations that would affect any other computer program implemented at similar scale (weather forecasts, or even just computing the average of a large stream of sensor readings).