Comment by betenoire

11 hours ago

Said another way, compilers are a translation of existing formal code. Compilers don't add features, they don't create algorithms (unrolling, etc., notwithstanding), they are another expression of the same encoded solution.

LLMs are nothing like that

LLMs are just translating text into output, too, and are running on deterministic computers like every other bit of code we run. They aren't magic.

It is just the scope that makes it appear non-deterministic to a human looking at it, and it is large enough to be impossible for a human to follow the entire deterministic chain, but that doesn't mean it isn't in the end a function that translates input data into output data in a deterministic way.

  • just text !== syntactically correct code that solves a defined problem

    There is a world of difference between translation and generation. It's even in the name: generative AI. I didn't say anything about magic.