Probabilistic algorithms are not new. If the distribution is known you can bend surprisingly many things to your will in the long run - and the most interesting part is the long run can be unexpectedly short.

LLMs are quite interesting in that regard because you have a lot of levers to influence the shape of the distribution; the ways are different for each model, so it’s a very experimental science, but applying the scientific method is exactly how you get good results.

I meant that no-one writes assembly anymore. I wasn't around when that transition happened, but I bet there were the same "this high-level language is compiling to inefficient code, it's useless" comments.