Determinism
A process is deterministic when the same input always produces exactly the same output, with no randomness involved.
Language models are not deterministic by default: sampling introduces variation even at temperature zero, because of how floating-point arithmetic is batched on hardware. Rule-based prompt compilers are deterministic, which is why the same description always compiles to a byte-identical prompt.
Related terms
- Temperature
- Temperature is a setting between 0 and roughly 2 that controls how much randomness a model uses when choosing each next token.
- Prompt evaluation
- Prompt evaluation is testing a prompt against a fixed set of inputs and grading criteria to find out whether a change actually improved it.
More on core concepts
See the full glossary, read the guides, or put it into practice in the prompt builder.