AI Glossary
Non-determinism
What is Non-determinism?
The property of AI models whereby the same prompt can produce different outputs on different runs. LLMs are non-deterministic by design — a temperature setting above zero introduces randomness in token selection. Non-determinism requires careful handling in production applications where consistency matters.
Example in practice
A QA team that runs the same test prompt against an AI feature ten times and receives ten slightly different responses is observing non-determinism — and should design their evaluation framework to account for output variance.
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