[ExI] Claude for president?

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 3:15 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 2:38 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 12:49 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >> LLMs are complex enough that, even with the controls as you say, it
> >> seems likely that two people - or even the same person - running the
> >> exact same non-trivial query two times would often enough get
> >> non-identical answers.
> >
> > It seems that way, but LLMs are themselves fully deterministic. So long
> as the exact same input and context are provided, their output is the same.
> In practice, however, the tokens a LLM deterministically predicts as most
> likely are then randomly selected by a higher level process to make the
> writing more dynamic. This is driven by the "heat" parameter. But by using
> a pseudorandom selection with the same seed, identical output can be
> ensured.
>
> This is true in the sense that the universe may be fully
> deterministic: technically true (possibly) but unreproducible in
> practice (given the complexity and number of inputs of a LLM worth
> advising the President of the United States) due to the very high
> number of variables.
>

You needn't invoke the determinism of the universe here. The context window
is the input. The output is the input followed by a series of matrix
multiplications. Each multiplication is deterministic. The result is
defined entirely by the input and the series of multiplications.

It may be a complex calculation involving a large variable, but
nevertheless it is a fully deterministic and repeatable one.

Jason



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