It's orthogonal to whether LLMs can be a useful abstraction layer, but ...

I have a feeling that if LLMs were built on a deterministic technology, a lot of the current AI-is-not-intelligent crowd would be saying "These LLMs can only generate one answer given a question, which means they lack human creativity and they'll never be intelligent!"

Interesting. I believe some circles reached the consensus that they aren't creative, but that it's independent of their intelligence/modelling capabilities.

it is a fruitless endeavour to try to appeal to a crowd that does not and will never understand the fundamentals of how llms work.