> I was thinking temperature=0, but what more do you need than that?

Temperature isn't a thing exclusive to LLMs or ML. It's a general technique from statistics where you're modifying the variance of the distribution (also see truncation). And as you're aware, temperature zero isn't actually temperature zero.

So say such a thing makes something non-statistical is the same as saying prime numbers don't exist because any prime p * 0 is 0.

  > A white box is a subset of a black box here

No. A white box and black box sit at opposite ends of a spectrum which is just saying how much we understand something. Complexity isn't what makes something a black box, it's our lack of understanding that does. Of course this tends to coinside, but there's plenty of extremely complex things we have a great understanding of, even if not to infinite precision.

Please take your passion and use it to drive you to learn about these things deeper. It's actually the same advice I give to the LLM fanboys who think it's AGI. But trying to dispel that myth without correct information makes it harder. It muddies the waters. These topics are extremely complex and the issue with the ML field is itself a hypocritical claim that it is easy (scale is all you need while calling these machines black boxes). I mean we can talk about the elephant in the room but certainly Von Neumann has said enough.