> First of all, what you're talking about is nondeterminism at the hardware level, subverting the software, which is, on an ideal/theoretical computer, fully deterministic (except in ways that we specifically tell it not to be, through the use of PRNGs or real entropy sources).
Malloc and free were never deterministic outside of the simplest systems.
The second we accepted OS preemption we gave up deterministic performance.
Good teams freeze their build tools at a specific version because even minor revs of compilers can change behavior.
I've used way too many schema generator tools that I'd describe as "wishfully deterministic".
Heuristics have been used for years in computer science, resulting in surprising behavior. My point is that if we ramp up the rate of WTF we are willing to tolerate, the power of the systems we can build increases drastically.
> Second of all, the frequency with which traditional programs are nondeterministic in this manner is multiple orders of magnitude less than the frequency of nondeterminism in LLMs. (Frankly, I'd put that latter number at 1.)
Building a RAG lookup system that takes in questions from the user, looks up answers in a doc, and returns results, can be built with reliability damn near approaching 99.99%.
I have seen code generation harnesses that also dramatically reduce non-determinism of LLM generated code, but that will continue to be a hard problem.
My phone camera applies non-deterministic optimizations to images I take, and has done so for years now.
GPS is non-deterministic (noisy), we smooth over the issues. GPS routing is also iffy, but again we smooth over the issues.
The question is can useful products be made with a technology. You can shove enough guardrails on an LLM interface to make it useful. That much is clear. I derive massive value from LLMs and other transformer based systems literally everyday. From the modern speech transcription systems, that are damn near magic compare to what we had a few years back, to image recognition, to natural language interfaces to search over company documents.
If we completely discard coding agents, LLMs are still an insanely impactful technology.
Those guardrails add costs, and latency. For some scenarios that is fine, but for others it isn't. Chat bot support agents implemented by the lowest bidder don't have any attempt at guardrails. Better systems are better built.
I agree that current LLMs all suffer from the problem that the control messages are intermixed with data, that is a crappy problem that the industry has known is a bad pattern for literally decades (since the 70s, 80s?). It seems like an intractable flaw in the systems.
But that doesn't make the system unusable any more than the thousand other protocols suffering from the same flaw are unusable.