AI unpredictability: An opportunity for Indian IT firms

Enterprise technology has long rested on a basic assumption: determinism.

- SIDDHARTH PAI

When a system gets identical inputs, it must yield identical outputs. Business and tech leaders rely on this expectation. Banks can reconcile millions of financial movements and telecom operators can bill subscribers accurately because the software they use behaves in a perfectly predictable manner. This is true across enterprises.Determinism is not a trivial engineering attribute; it gives regulators assurance, auditors clarity and businesses stability. It is an unspoken contract between organizations and their digital systems. Historically, that contract has been upheld. Large language models (LLMs), however, have begun to stretch this longstanding assumption.

The LLMs of AI did not descend from the deterministic lineage of classic enterprise systems. They emerged from probability theory, pattern recognition and statistical learning. An LLM knows that in English, 'good' is more likely to follow 'very' than, say, 'hippopotamus.' But ask the same LLM the same question twice and its responses may vary even if it didn't hallucinate. It may generate 'cold' after 'very' rather than 'good.'