Comment by runarberg

Like I said, usually this is used to debunk false claims about LLMs being compilers. I personally think there are better arguments to be made to debunk that, but the probabilistic nature of LLMs is an obvious one, so it is not unsurprising that it is also popular.

I don‘t think I have ever seen anybody make a claim that LLMs are a bad (or otherwise limited) technology because of the probabilistic nature of it. Plenty of excellent algorithms (including other machine learning algorithms) are probabilistic and work excellently for what they are meant to do. Problems arise when the algorithm is used for something more, and that is the case against LLMs. It is a next token prediction algorithm that people are using to write software. If they treat it as a compiler it will be lacking, and LLMs being non-deterministic is one of many reasons for why LLMs are bad compilers (or more accurately; are in fact not compilers).

And for that matter, neither are humans compilers. If you find an AI-hater who says “humans are good compilers” then I will agree with you that that person is wrong.