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Comment by whiddershins

2 months ago

LLMs in data pipelines enable all sorts of “before impossible” stuff. For example, this creates an event calendar for you based on emails you have received:

https://www.indexself.com/events/molly-pepper

(that’s mine, and is due a bugfix/update this week. message me if you want to try it with your own emails)

I have a couple more LLM-powered apps in the works, like next few weeks, that aren’t chat or code. I wouldn’t call them transformative, but they meet your other criteria, I think.

What part of this can't be done by a novice programmer who knows a little pattern matching and has enough patience to write down a hundred patterns to match?

  • Long tail, coping with typos, and understanding negation.

    If natural language was as easy as "enough patience to write down a hundred patterns to match", we'd have had useful natural language interfaces in the early 90s — or even late 80s, if it was really only "a hundred".

    • For narrow use cases we did have natural language interfaces in the 90s, yes. See e.g. IRC bots.

      Or to take a local example, for more than 20 years my city has had a web service where you can type "When is the next bus from Street A to Road B", and you get a detailed response including any transfers between lines. They even had a voice recognition version decades ago that you could call, which worked well.

      From GP post, I was replying specifically to

      > LLMs in data pipelines enable all sorts of “before impossible” stuff. > For example, this creates an event calendar for you based on emails you have received

      That exact thing has been a feature of Gmail for over a decade. Remember the 2018 GCal spam?

      https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/advanced-phishing-i...

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