[ModernMech]

> I don't mean to be pedantic.

I'm sorry in advance, but this reply is just to meet pedantry with pedantry.

> A computer will always do what you tell it to do.

This is the Bohr model of computers. It's the kind of thing you tell elementary school students because it's conceptually simple and mostly right, but I think we know better here on HN. Pedantically, computers don't always do what you tell them to, because the don't always hear what you tell them, and what you tell them can be corrupted even when they do hear it.

For instance, random particles from outer space can cause a computer to behave quite randomly: https://www.thegamer.com/how-ionizing-particle-outer-space-h...

  why was nobody able to pull it off, even when replicating exactly the inputs that DOTA_Teabag had used? Simple: this glitch requires a phenomenon known as a single-event upset, which is very much out of any player's control.

I don't think we can reasonably say that in this instance, the computer behaved according to what the user told it to do. In fact, it responded to the user and the environment.

[Wowfunhappy]

That's true. An earlier version of my comment called out hardware problems as an exception—insufficient error correction for neutrino bit flips is fundamentally a hardware problem—but I removed it before posting. In a way, I feel hardware bugs do still follow this principle: The electrons in the circuits are behaving as they always do, just not in the way we intended. But I agree this gets philosophically messy—no one "programmed" the electrons.

My underlying point is that, at least in 99.999% of cases, the problem isn't the calculator, it's the human using the calculator incorrectly. And although you could draw some parallels between calculators and AIs with regard to selecting the right tool and knowing when and how to use it, I'd say the randomness involved in an LLM is fundamentally different.

[bradjohnson]

I don't think it's fundamentally different, and I think you're conflating complexity with randomness.