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naasking parent
Successful compiler optimizations are probabilistic though, from the programmer's point of view. LLMs are internally deterministic too.
miningape
What? Do you even know how compilers work?
naasking OP
Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed? They are applied deterministically inside a compiler, but often based on heuristics, and the complex interplay of optimizations in complex programs means that sometimes they will not do what you expect them to do. Sometimes they work better than expected, and sometimes worse. Sounds familiar...
miningape
> Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed?

Yes, because:

> They are applied deterministically inside a compiler

Sorry, but an LLM randomly generating the next token isn't even comparable.

Deterministic complexity =/= randomness.

naasking OP
> Yes, because:

Unless you wrote the compiler, you are 100% full of it. Even as the compiler writer you'd be wrong sometimes.

> Deterministic complexity =/= randomness.

LLMs are also deterministically complex, not random.

miningape
> Unless you wrote the compiler, you are 100% full of it. Even then you'd be wrong sometimes

You can check the source code? What's hard to understand? If you find it compiled something wrong, you can walk backwards through the code, if you want to find out what it'll do walk forwards. LLMs have no such capability.

Sure maybe you're limited by your personal knowledge on the compiler chain, but again complexity =/= randomness.

For the same source code, and compiler version (+ flags) you get the exact same output every time. The same cannot be said of LLMs, because they use randomness (temperature).

> LLMs are also deterministically complex, not random

What exactly is the temperature setting in your LLM doing then? If you'd like to argue pseudorandom generators our computers are using aren't random - fine, I agree. But for all practical purposes they're random, especially when you don't control the seed.

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