> calls out LLMs for being non-deterministic as a grave sin. Despite it being untrue (they've never heard of temperature, I guess)
With all that grandstanding you've missed the author's point because temperature doesn't make them deterministic in any way that matters in the real world.
It only makes their output deterministic for the exact sequence of input tokens (I've yet to see an application where this would be useful, just save the result if you want the exact same one!), but it doesn't make them deterministic for a different but semantically equivalent sequence of tokens, which is the core value proposition of LLMs.
The answer to "How tall is the Eiffel tower?" shouldn't change based on whether I also add "and where is its nearest bakery?", but with more complex questions, that's what often happens.