[syndicatedjelly]

Not trying to nitpick, but the phrase "AI is just like another function" is too charitable in my opinion. A function, in mathematics as well as programming, transforms a given input into a specific output in the codomain space. Per the Wikipedia definition,

    In mathematics, a function from a set X to a set Y assigns to each element of X exactly one element of Y.[1] The set X is called the domain of the function[2] and the set Y is called the codomain of the function.[3]

Not to call you out specifically, but a lot of people seem to misunderstand AI as being just like any other piece of code. The problem is, unlike most of the code and functions we write, it's not simply another function, and even worse, it's usually not deterministic. If we both give a function the same input, we should expect the same input. But this isn't the case when we paste text into ChatGPT or something similar.

[owenpalmer]

LLMs are deterministic. It's just that the random seed is hidden from you, but is still an input.

[int_19h]

LLMs are literally a deterministic function of a bunch of numbers to a bunch of numbers. The non-deterministic part only comes when you apply the random pick to select a token based on the weights (deterministically) computed by the model.