Comment by kmaitreys

9 hours ago

High level languages that replaced assembly are not black boxes.

And they're as deterministic as as the underlying thing they're abstracting... which is kinda what makes an abstraction an abstraction.

I get that people love saying LLMs are just compilers from human language to $OUTPUT_FORMAT but... they simply are not except in a stretchy metaphorical sense.

That's only true if you reduce the definition of "compiler" to a narrow `f = In -> Out`. But that is _not_ a compiler. We have a word for that: function. And in LLM's case an impure one.