this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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lmao: they have fixed this issue, it seems to always run python now. Got to love how they just put this shit in production as "stable" Gemini 2.5 pro with that idiotic multiplication thing that everyone knows about, and expect what? to Eliza Effect people into marrying Gemini 2.5 pro?
Have they fixed it as in genuinely uses python completely reliably or "fixed" it, like they tweaked the prompt and now it use python 95% of the time instead of 50/50? I'm betting on the later.
Non-deterministic LLMs will always have randomness in their output. Best they can hope for is layers of sanity checke slowing things down and costing more.
If you wire the LLM directly into a proof-checker (like with AlphaGeometry) or evaluation function (like with AlphaEvolve) and the raw LLM outputs aren't allowed to do anything on their own, you can get reliability. So you can hope for better, it just requires a narrow domain and a much more thorough approach than slapping some extra firm instructions in an unholy blend of markup languages in the prompt.
In this case, solving math problems is actually something Google search could previously do (before dumping AI into it) and Wolfram Alpha can do, so it really seems like Google should be able to offer a product that does math problems right. Of course, this solution would probably involve bypassing the LLM altogether through preprocessing and post processing.
Also, btw, LLM can be (technically speaking) deterministic if the heat is set all the way down, its just that this doesn't actually improve their performance at math or anything else. And it would still be "random" in the sense that minor variations in the prompt or previous context can induce seemingly arbitrary changes in output.