> Having their output employ randomness by default is a choice, not a requirement

This is not really meaningfully true. E.g. batching, heterogeneous inference HW, and even differences in model versions can make a difference in what result you get, and these are hard to solve.

But again, these are all things that are also true of build systems.

GCC 16.1 vs. 15.2 will get you differences. GNU ld vs. gold vs. mold vs. lld will get you differences. Whether you do or do not employ LTO or other whole-program optimization vs. whether you do gets you differences.

Have you never debugged a race condition that worked on your machine but didn't work in prod, based only on how things ended up compiled in the final binary?

I'm not saying these are identical but there's a lot more similarity than you all seem to understand. And we've made compilers work well enough that a lot of you believe that they give very routine, very deterministic outputs as part of broader build systems even though nothing could be further from the truth, even today.