Christine Lemmer-WebberMar 5

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

Noooooooooo
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

LLMs are not compilers, and they're not assemblers. Determinism is a key aspect to assemblers and compilers.

And they *certainly* can't be part of a reproducible pipeline

Show threadRod Van MeterMar 6
@cwebber mostly agree, especially about them not being compilers, but some compilers aren't deterministic. You'll get a different result in memory layout or optimization sometimes. Especially for quantum compilers, where the compilation process itself is known to be NP hard, so heuristics are used.
Show threadyalemanMar 6
@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 :)
Show threadRod Van Meter
@yaleman mmm, not gonna dispute that, but decades ago I noticed that classical compilers aren't necessarily deterministic. Wild, but true -- even if the compiler doesn't have outright bugs, which of course it does.
Mar 9 at 9:19amWeb