Comment by 9rx

> The amount of non-determinism in compiler and LLM output is so vast that even comparing them is silly.

What is that supposed to mean? Yes, LLMs are often considered to be non-deterministic because, in practice, they rely on systems with unstable floating point rounding. Likewise, compilers are often considered non-deterministic because, in practice, they often rely on systems with unstable thread execution order. Of course, those are both just implementation details. You can, albeit at the cost of things like performance, remove the hidden inputs. Computers are fundamentally deterministic! Anything that runs on computers must also be deterministic.

If you were to run a compiler or LLM on a Turing machine, they would both be 100% perfectly deterministic. We only see them as being non-deterministic because, in the real world, we run them on hardware that plays tricks with computation by introducing inputs via hidden side channels. But, again, those are implementation details. Compilers and LLMs are not defined by any particular implementation.