What's this about?
"I don't know whether God plays dice, but right now it's the large models rolling them — and humans have already started making money off those rolls." dotey's reply: does swapping "rolling dice" for "casting a hexagram" suddenly make it sound more scientific and reasonable?
What is the observation underneath the joke?
That these systems are sampling, not computing. A model with temperature above zero produces a different answer each time, drawn from a distribution — and an enormous amount of economic activity is now built on outputs generated that way. Einstein's objection to quantum mechanics was that a fundamental theory should not be probabilistic. The modern version is stranger: the randomness is not a limitation anyone is trying to remove, it is load-bearing, and the same prompt twice is not expected to give the same answer.
Why is it worth noticing?
- It is the funniest framing of the week for something the industry has largely stopped noticing.
- dotey's hexagram reply makes the sharper point: the vocabulary we use to describe sampling determines whether it sounds rigorous or mystical, and neither word changes the mechanism.
- Non-determinism as an accepted property of production systems is a genuinely new engineering situation.