I keep seeing lots of people saying "LLMs are like compilers/assemblers for prompts"

[nobody@mastodon.acm.org]

@cwebber
PGO go brrrrr

[baloouriza@social.tulsa.ok.us]

@cwebber This is more like the Pentium 4 idea of predictive branching, but with even larger pipeline stalls. Except the P4 could still do math.

[osma@mas.to]

For the people who compare an LLM to a compiler, the latter are not deterministic. They can not understand how sometimes* programs work, and sometimes they do not. The fault for this must be in the computer - hence LLMs equal compilers.

*depending on source code input and running conditions.
@cwebber

[cdonat@hostsharing.coop]

@rdviii @cwebber

Heuristics aren't non-deterministic by definition. Of course it is possible to come up with non-deterministic heuristics, just like with any kind of algorithm. But by far most heuristics are very deterministic, just like most algorithms are, heuristic, or not.

[ryanc@infosec.exchange]

@drwho @cstanhope @mcc @mntmn @cwebber Honestly, I would prefer LLM generated code over grad student generated code.

[yaleman@mastodon.social]

@rdviii Ok but who's actually talking about *quantum compilers* when they are just saying "compilers" as a general term? ... other than people who work exclusively on QC's, who would be ... an incredibly tiny minority

[carl@chaos.social]

@cwebber I am really Hung-up on the non-deterministic Character of LLMs lately. This essential quality makes them fit for solving specific kinds of problems und TOTALLY unfit for other kinds of problems.
I am working on my wisdom to get this right for each given problem.

[ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog]

@joeyh I'm glad to see that someone else has considered this angle. It's always bugged me a little when I see the "they aren't deterministic" argument, but I've kept it to myself because nobody likes a pedant and of course @cwebber already understands as much.

I just worry that if this critique were to become more popular then the LLM makers would just implement the ability to specify a seed, then sit back and play the game where they say

we heard your criticism and have addressed it

Most people have no reason to have developed an advanced reasoning capacity about randomness, and I dread having to explain to them how something can be both deterministic and stochastic in nature ​

[kkarhan@infosec.space]

@cwebber precisely that!

A #shitposting - Program is anything but #reproduceable and I want #ReproduceableBuilds for #auditability, #security and #transparency.

• That's the whole reason I do @OS1337: To have something so fundamentally simple and compact that it is (at least in theory - at some point) financially feasible to crowdfund complete code audits of the entire system.
  • I don't want people to trust me blindly, but to earn trust in the few things I code.

That's why I treat any "#AI" / #AIslop the same way @dolphin treat any leaks from Nintendo:

• I'm not even gonna look at it!

[pautasso@scholar.social]

@cwebber if, just like with asm, reading and reviewing generated code is not longer a necessary thing, then the productivity bottleneck shifts to how much time is spent "engineering" the prompt.

[eviloatmeal@ak.angelstrapped.com]

@cwebber @joeyh If someone invented an LLM that gave me powerups and metaprogression, I might be slightly interested.

[littledetritus@geraffel.social]

@cwebber This might actually be subject to change though.

Njoy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22954

Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)

tl;dr: LLMs are coming closer and closer to conveying reproducible outputs. One could be under the impression that if trained on the same data and towards a certain size asymtotic behaviour would be a resonable expectation, becaus that happens with large numbers in statistics.

What a ... surprise.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@ansuz @joeyh And of course there is the question, what is and isn't a compiler? Aren't all functions compilers?

Indeed, Blender's rendering system is in many ways a compiler for images.

But we don't use that way, because it's not helpful, even though Blender and ffmpeg are MORE of compilers than LLMs are. People are reaching for "LLMs might be compilers!" because of the thing they want it to *do* rather than how it *acts*, even though Blender and ffmpeg are by far, under those definitions, much more of compilers than LLMs are.

[cwebber@social.coop]

@ansuz @joeyh To put it another way: even though we could call Blender and ffmpeg compilers in a way that would be hard to argue with, we don't, and it wouldn't be useful if we did because we wouldn't understand each other well.

Please don't call LLMs compilers.

[kye@tech.lgbt]

@cwebber The metaphor I reach for is processors. They're language coprocessors, and language is messy in a way most things coprocessors have done aren't. We're at "Hello World" in figuring out what to do with them.

[srazkvt@tech.lgbt]

@cwebber ok i'm going to be very annoying here but

don't some old versions of msvc choose certain optimisations randomly ?

[aparrish@friend.camp]

@cwebber for me, the question isn't determinism but epistemology. the llm "compiles" by chaining predictions based on statistics which are derived from empirical data—i.e. its model of the "compilation" process is "usually when there's x in the input, there's y in the output." a conventional compiler is based on deductive reasoning about how x requires y. the former is totally parasitic on the latter (i.e. if the underlying reasoning didn't exist, empirical data on its operation couldn't exist)

[natty@astolfo.social]

@cwebber@social.coop to be fair I don't think determinism is a defining property of compilers

I should make a stochastic compiler (whatever that means)

[natty@astolfo.social]

@alina@girldick.gay @cwebber@social.coop @joeyh@sunbeam.city try mewgenics try mewgenics try mewgenics

[hackbod@mastodon.social]

@ansuz @joeyh @cwebber

Ah but even if you can use a specific seed and try to use this to call it a "compiler", your compiler here is the very specific sets of weights within that model, and any change breaks its determinism. I think there being one and exactly one possible implementation to get the specified set of outputs can count as an actual compiler.