This debate conflates two senses of the word deterministic:
1. Repeatable: the same inputs always lead to the same outputs
2. Algorithmic: the answer is arrived at by a set of steps that can clearly be shown to produce output with some desired property.
(2 is not a textbook definition of deterministic that I’ve ever heard, but I think it’s what people mean here)
LLMs don’t usually satisfy definition 1. They could, in principle, but it wouldn’t matter if they did. It wouldn’t tell you anything about whether the outputs are trustworthy.
What people seem to want is 2, but 2 is, I think, a contradiction. There cannot be an algorithmic process that can turns a natural language prompt into a working program, because natural language is too ambiguous to specify an output.
Nevertheless I agree with the main point of the article. Non-algorithmic processes (like intelligence) can produce algorithmic processes (like software). After all that’s what human programmers do!
1. Repeatable: the same inputs always lead to the same outputs 2. Algorithmic: the answer is arrived at by a set of steps that can clearly be shown to produce output with some desired property.
(2 is not a textbook definition of deterministic that I’ve ever heard, but I think it’s what people mean here)
LLMs don’t usually satisfy definition 1. They could, in principle, but it wouldn’t matter if they did. It wouldn’t tell you anything about whether the outputs are trustworthy.
What people seem to want is 2, but 2 is, I think, a contradiction. There cannot be an algorithmic process that can turns a natural language prompt into a working program, because natural language is too ambiguous to specify an output.
Nevertheless I agree with the main point of the article. Non-algorithmic processes (like intelligence) can produce algorithmic processes (like software). After all that’s what human programmers do!