alt Hacker NewsThe discussions around this point are taking it too seriously, even when they are 100% correct. LLMs are not deterministic, so they are not compilers. Sure, if you specify everything - every tiny detail, you can often get them to mostly match. But not 100%. Even if you do fix that, at that point you are coding using English, which is an inefficient language for that level of detail in a specification. And even if you accept that problem, you still have gone to a ton of work just to fight the fundamental non-deterministic nature of LLMs.
It all feels to me like the guys who make videos of using using electric drills to hammer in a nail - Sure, you can do that, but it is the wrong tool for the job. Everyone knows the phrase: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." But we need to also keep in mind the other side of that coin: "When all you have is nails, all you need is a hammer." LLMs are not a replacement for everything that happens to be digital.
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>LLMs are not deterministic, so they are not compilers.
"Deterministic" is not the the right constraint to introduce here. Plenty of software is non-deterministic (such as LLMs! But also, consensus protocols, request routing architecture, GPU kernels, etc) so why not compilers?
What a compiler needs is not determinism, but semantic closure. A system is semantically closed if the meanings of its outputs are fully defined within the system, correctness can be evaluated internally and errors are decidable. LLMs are semantically open. A semantically closed compiler will never output nonsense, even if its output is nondeterministic. But two runs of a (semantically closed) nondeterministic compiler may produce two correct programs, one being faster on one CPU and the other faster on another. Or such a compiler can be useful for enhancing security, e.g. programs behave identically, resist fingerprinting.
Nondeterminism simply means the compiler selects any element of an equivalence class. Semantic closure ensures the equivalence class is well‑defined.
Are conventional compilers actually deterministic, with all the bells and whistles enabled? PGO seems like it ought to have a random element.
LLMs are deterministic at minimal temperature. Talking about determinism completely misses the point. The human brain is also non-deterministic and I don't see anybody dismiss human written code based on that. If you remove randomness and choose tokens deterministically, that doesn't magically solve the problems of LLMs.
> LLMs are not deterministic
They are designed to be where temperature=0. Some hardware configurations are known defy that assumption, but when running on perfect hardware they most definitely are.
What you call compilers are also nondeterministic on 'faulty' hardware, so...
I think the point I wanted to make was that even if it was deterministic (which you can technically make it to be I guess?) you still shouldn’t live in a world where you’re guided by the “guesses” that the model makes when solidifying your intent into concrete code. Discounting hallucinations (I know this a is a big preconception, I’m trying to make the argument from a disadvantaged point again), I think you need a stronger argument than determinism in the discussion against someone who claims they can write in English, no reason for code anymore; which is what I tried to make here. I get your point that I might be taking the discussion to seriously though.