• derek@infosec.pub
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    1 day ago

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    I agree that LLMs do not understand what it is they are predicting. At least no more than any other computer program “understands” its output. Which is to say: they are not conscious beings experiencing things.

    This doesn’t mean LLM output is random. It means they aren’t thinking persons. You may have confused random with non-deterministic. LLMs are complex guessing machines that require a fudge-factor to produce meaningfully useful output. If the guesses were fully random then they’d have a significantly narrower field of practical applications.

    • disregardable@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      I just don’t understand why you think it needs to be “fully random” to be called random, when the output is in fact random. To me, when you can ask it the same question multiple times and receive different answers, it’s random and unreliable. You may argue it only changes its answer randomly 10% of the time or whatever- it’s still random. It doesn’t matter if it only answers incorrectly 10% of the time or 5% of the time. Every time the answer is unreliable, because sometimes it changes its answer for no reason.

      • derek@infosec.pub
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        22 hours ago

        You don’t understand because you’re either not paying attention or because you’re trolling.

        Random would be output like this:

        Ostrich maypole dandy ironic. Great cucumber zebra!

        Or this:

        fhsjarbskzkdbsjzb kOdbg zkakfiebwkl

        Random would be a password generator. Random would be utter nonsense. Incoherent. That’s not what LLMs produce.