Stochastic CHAOS: Why Deterministic Inference Kills, and Distributional Variability Is the Heartbeat of Artifical Cognition
This challenges a key assumption in LLM deployment for reliability and safety, proposing a paradigm shift that could impact all AI applications relying on deterministic outputs.
The paper argues that deterministic inference in large language models (LLMs) is harmful because it conceals uncertainty, suppresses emergent abilities, and underestimates safety risks, advocating for stochastic methods to capture distributional variability. Empirically, it shows deterministic inference underestimates capability and fragility, degrades reasoning accuracy, and hides dangerous behaviors.
Deterministic inference is a comforting ideal in classical software: the same program on the same input should always produce the same output. As large language models move into real-world deployment, this ideal has been imported wholesale into inference stacks. Recent work from the Thinking Machines Lab has presented a detailed analysis of nondeterminism in LLM inference, showing how batch-invariant kernels and deterministic attention can enforce bitwise-identical outputs, positioning deterministic inference as a prerequisite for reproducibility and enterprise reliability. In this paper, we take the opposite stance. We argue that, for LLMs, deterministic inference kills. It kills the ability to model uncertainty, suppresses emergent abilities, collapses reasoning into a single brittle path, and weakens safety alignment by hiding tail risks. LLMs implement conditional distributions over outputs, not fixed functions. Collapsing these distributions to a single canonical completion may appear reassuring, but it systematically conceals properties central to artificial cognition. We instead advocate Stochastic CHAOS, treating distributional variability as a signal to be measured and controlled. Empirically, we show that deterministic inference is systematically misleading. Single-sample deterministic evaluation underestimates both capability and fragility, masking failure probability under paraphrases and noise. Phase-like transitions associated with emergent abilities disappear under greedy decoding. Multi-path reasoning degrades when forced onto deterministic backbones, reducing accuracy and diagnostic insight. Finally, deterministic evaluation underestimates safety risk by hiding rare but dangerous behaviors that appear only under multi-sample evaluation.