AI Is a Number Factory, Not a Wordsmith

Logosofia no Dia a Dia · Sep 11, 2026 · 29m

Daniel's prompt this week asks a deceptively simple question: if AI models are built on mathematics, and math is deterministic, why do they behave so unpredictably? The answer isn't in the math itself — it's in the scheduling. We open the hood on what a large language model actually is (a stack of matrices doing multiply-and-add, with a decoding layer bolted on at the end), then trace the real source of non-determinism: batch-dependent floating-point reduction order. Thinking Machines Lab sampled a thousand completions of "tell me about Richard Feynman" at temperature zero using Qwen 3 235B…