If I was Stephen Wolfram, i'd be screaming (in a very academic way) "you are just talking about computational irreducibility!!" LLMs are very close to computationally irreducible, no chance you can predict its output from the prompt alone. Source code meanwhile is fairly reducible (and is typically reduced to machine code by the compiler). And even complex source code is intentionally designed to be highly reducible via abstractions. Good luck making prompts that reduce the complexity of the LLM behavior!
replyIt's not the narrow view, it's the only actual definition of determinism. Words have meaning. Determinism means "same cause = same effect". If the cause is underspecified and requires interpretation that varies depending on the interpreter, the whole concept is meaningless. Intelligence (human or machine) operates in an underspecified domain, it makes sense to talk about undefined behavior, misinterpretation, alignment, anything really, but not determinism.
replyyells at cloud
Random number generators are deterministic. If you give it the same seed, you get the same result. But that does not mean that a human can predict, for a new seed, what the result will be.
replypsuedo-random number generators are deterministic.
replya human can predict that the number that is generated will be suitably random.
a human can predict the result from a pseudo-random generator with enough knowledge of seed/program state/etc.
now I can't say this holds for a TRUE random number generator. nor do I know where we were going with this.