[andyfilms1]

I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.

[tux1968]

People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is just cope, not a principled argument.

[runarberg]

So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1.

I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.

[andyfilms1]

I feel like we're both in similar minds of opposite sides, so perhaps you can answer me this: How is a deterministic AI any different from a search engine?

In other words, if you and me always get the same results back for the same prompt (definition of determinism,) isn't that just really, really power hungry Google?