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quietbritishjim • yesterday at 7:56 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

That totally misses the point. No matter how surprising the output of the compiler's adaptive optimiser, the observable behaviour (except speed) of the program, when run, will be the same. That is clearly not true of LLM output.


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aforwardslash • yesterday at 9:39 PM

Thats actually exactly on point; thing is, are programs deterministic? It depends; one can argue that any speculative execution pipeline cannot be truely deterministic from a timing perspective; its not an issue for a compiler, but it is for many applications. Gcc optimization flags were notorious to expose both compiler defects and non-deterministic code.

An LLM is a stochacstic system. With enough rounds, its undistinguishable from an emulated deterministic one, if you consider a delta greater than zero. Oh and each implementation/iteration give you the same determinism guarantees :)

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