I thought this was pretty well known (at least in the JAX/XLA world). I've hit this many times and got batch variance explained to me before: https://github.com/google-deepmind/penzai/issues/82 and https://github.com/jax-ml/jax/issues/20047#issuecomment-1975...

I am still irritated by the name of the company.

What is the reasoning behind these schemes? The hope that bits of the properties of legendary companies will rub off onto the new venture?

As if naming the next best venture PARC will inevitably create a breakthrough in networking just by the arrangement of four letters.

Fixing "theoretical" nondeterminism for a totally closed individual input-output pair doesn't solve the two "practical" nondeterminism problems, where the exact same input gives different results given different preceding context, and where a slightly transformed input doesn't give a correctly transformed result.

Until those are addressed, closed-system nondeterminism doesn't really help except in cases where a lookup table would do just as well. You can't use "correct" unit tests or evaluation sets to prove anything about inputs you haven't tested.

Natural language is ambiguous. It needs to be. I think the approach here of trying to figure out how to make circles into squares, and argue why circles should be squares, is misguided.

Discussions of this type are going to eventually morph into better understanding of how to accept ambiguity and randomness in language, and further shape it with other larger sub-patterns beyond the little proto-grammars that the QKV projection matrices extract.

For fun over the last few days, I've built a compressor / decompressor that uses the logits from an LLM, for each token in the input, then takes the ranks and exponential goolomb encodes them. Then you work in reverse to regenerate the original

It took me ages to get the prediction for the second token after "hello" to match the same as the prediction for the second token when running the model on the string "hello world", despite the fact that I was using a causal model. I tried all kinds of things before discovering that `quantized: false` was the important setting.

Sometimes, the reason for non-determinism is implementation-specific. For instance, in GPT-2's source code (I haven't checked other model versions), setting the temperature in the GUI does not lead to a value of 0 but "epsilon" (a very small value larger than 0), to avoid a division by zero error in the code, which makes sense.

For many applications, non-determinism implies "useless". This has been a long standing issue with LDA topic models. In particular in the legal, financial and regulatory domains, if a method is not deterministic, it may be illegal to use it or it may lead to follow-on requirements that one does not want (e.g. all screens shown to humans must be preserved to be able to go back and reconstruct what exactly happened to a particular user in a particular second).

I love high quality blog post style research discussion - Anthropic has been leading the charge with this recently and it's great to see it spreading. OpenAI was also doing this during all the RL research days.

I really hope we will get deterministic LLMs in the future. Even if it causes slightly slower response times.

Nondeterminism is what currently keeps me from working with other developers.

As I wrote in "Prompt Coding" [1], these days I am not looking for good code. I am looking for prompts that create good code. But how do you share prompts among developers when they produce different code every time? You cannot simply state "Here, I found a prompt that makes gpt-5-2025-08-07 output a solution with all the desired attributes".

Similar with images. At the moment, for most image models, you cannot outsource the task of writing prompts that create the desired images. Because most image models will not create the same image when given the same prompt and parameters.

[1]: https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

As the bottom of LLM inference, it is sampling for the next token based on the probability distribution conditioned on the tokens currently in the context window. If the distribution exhibits degeneracy in probability for more than token, outcome of the sampling will naturally, as it should, be nondeterministic. It should be left alone.

From their code:

    A = torch.randn(2048, 2048, device='cuda', dtype=torch.bfloat16)
    B = torch.randn(2048, 2048, device='cuda', dtype=torch.bfloat16)
    ref = torch.mm(A, B)
    for _ in range(1000):
         assert (torch.mm(A, B) - ref).abs().max().item() == 0

Where this gets really complicated is when you are chaining many LLM calls together (basically any agent). A slight deviation in the call stack can throw off everything else.

Very impressive! I guess this still wouldn't affect their original example

> For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results.

even with 0.0 temperature due to MOE models routing at a batch level, and you're very unlikely to get a deterministic batch.

> Not because we’re somehow leaking information across batches — instead, it’s because our forward pass lacks “batch invariance”, causing our request’s output to depend on the batch size of our forward pass.

The router also leaks batch-level information across sequences.

It reminded me of this wonderful talk by the late Joe Armstrong (Erlang's creator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

Great post.

Super interesting. For those unaware, this is the company Mira Murati (OpenAI previous CTO) started

I think this means that the results might also be non-deterministic across hardware revisions b/c I don't think they verified that the kernels will work the same on different GPU & TPU versions b/c how do they know that the compiler will not re-order the operations behind their back?

We know what thinking machines does yet?

It should also be noted that PyTorch has a page about reproducibility: https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html

TL;DR

Seed your PRNGs and call torch.use_deterministic_algorithms(True) to get the deterministic kernels. They may be slightly slower, but in practice, you probably will not notice.

Note that results will still differ between different drivers and GPUs. It would be great if NVIDIA tried harder in that regard.

Job one is have every bit of software involved also be deterministic, which stagex takes care of.

I had no problem getting deterministic LLM outputs when I experimented with this 6 months ago.

Run two of these with the same prompts and same seed and you get the same results.

Obviously in GPU clusters with different hardware things get more complicated.

https://git.distrust.co/public/llmshell

His solution still relies on greedy (temperature 0) sampling, which is probably not optimal for model performance on various tasks. For example, Gemini 2.5 uses temperature 1 by default. But deterministic inference with temperature >0 can still be achieved by using pseudorandom sampling with a fixed seed.

cool project but if this is what you are producing with $2 billion funding, i doubt you will survive. This is the type of article a grad student would write over a weekend.

Who needs a working product when you can spend all day designing the most WEWORK looking website and slap some pseud slop on it. It's like crypto "startups" but it's not even fun.

I am baffled that I still run against these statement years after LLM's have been around. LLM's are deterministic and always have been. The reason people are having issues with them is because they are basing their assumptions on api based experiments. Like my man, how can you be making these statements when you haven't done the due diligence of running the LLM on your own hardware with all of the variables locked down and accounted for? If you do just that it would become obviously clear that they are deterministic and most of the time the reason you see the non deterministic behavior is because you have not controlled for a variable. Usually prompt caching, batch processing or some other obvious variable. Now this is related to within same system deterministic behavior. You might get different answers when running on a different gpu, but at least for same systems the behavior is 100% identical if you account for all server startup flags and properly account for things like prompt cashing, slot contamination etc...