alt Hacker NewsNo it's absolutely not. One of these is a generative stochastic process that has no guarantee at all that it will produce correct data, and in fact you can make the OPPOSITE guarantee, you are guaranteed to sometimes get incorrect data. The other is a deterministic process of data access. I could perhaps only agree with you in the sense that such faults are not uniquely hallucinatory, all outputs from an LLM are.
I don't agree with these theoretical boundaries you provide. Any database can appear to lack in determinism, because data might get deleted, corrupted or mutated. Hardware and software involved might fail intermittently.
The illusion of determinism in RDBMS systems is just that, an illusion. The reason why I used the examples of failures in interacting with such systems that I did is that most experienced developers are familiar with those situations and can relate to them, while the probability for the reader to having experienced a truer apparent indeterminism is lower.
LLM:s can provide an illusion of determinism as well, some are quite capable of repeating themselves, e.g. overfitting, intentional or otherwise.