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I Asked AI to Count My Carbs 27,000 Times. It Couldn’t Give Me the Same Answer Twice.
(www.diabettech.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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That it is not a calculator and is horrible at determinism is not debatable, however its (very biased) huge knowledge is its core feature
The models themselves are actually entirely deterministic. The non-determinism you see is actually artificially introduced at the application layer to make the output seem more human. It's usually controlled by a setting called "heat", which when set to 0 will give completely reproducible results.
This is correct, I suppose you're talking about the final softmax layer? When I said they are bad at determinism, I was talking about reasoning on deterministic rules not having deterministic output. For example, LLMs make logical deduction errors, calculation errors etc.
How come it's inaccurate about 40% of the time when I know the answer then? It's a bullshit factory. A chatbot that's fundamentally designed to sound like a person and be able to respond to any prompt. But truth isn't any part of the fundamental architecture of an LLM.
Bullshit factory is very apt. I was using it for an open book exam and it gave answers entirely skewed to the way the question was asked.
For example, if I asked “is X bacteria a pathogen in Y disease”, it would say yes, it was a very bad pathogen.
If I asked “what effects does X bacteria have in this body system”, it said it was a beneficial bacteria.
Never trust the AI summary, you have to fully read the studies.
It does lie and hallucinate a lot, especially with biased context in the question (the bullshit part). The (biased) knowledge is hiding somewhere in its weights, it is just that it is sometimes quite hard to recover.
Your 40% depends a lot on how you ask the questions and the field of these questions. Humanity's last exam is a morr obiective benchmark for measuring the wide knowledge of LLMs.
Dude, they fail that exam with even worse error rates than I see!
When you can verify it, it's OFTEN and REGULARLY wrong. It's stupid to trust if for anything you can't personally verify.
The designed purpose of LLMs is to respond to human interaction, not to be correct. They are the showoff who pretends he can answer every question. They are the confident drunkard at the bar who will tell you anything that pops into their head. Intelligent, knowledgeable people say "I don't know" when they don't know. LLMs don't do that. Ever. Trouble is, they don't "know" anything. They're a chatbot from the bottom up. Chatbot through and through. It's their fundamental nature.
Yes there was knowledge and deep understanding in their training data. Also, I ate chicken curry for tea. However, I am not a chicken, I do not cluck, I haven't started eating worms, I cannot produce any chicken, and my poop is not chicken either. My poop smells faintly of curry. So it is with LLMs and the knowledge and understanding in their training data.
They beat any human on that knowledge benchmark, completely unrelated to your 40% "test". Try to answer any of the example questions on the main page.
I don't need a metaphor I know LLMs are hallucinating, lying, bullshitting. That doesn't invalidate my point.