Comment by torginus

All this would imply that the core value derives from better rec systems and not LLMs, which will merely embed the recommendation into their polite fluff.

Rec systems are in use right now everywhere, and they're not exactly mindblowing in practice. If we take my example of books with certain plotlines, it would need some super-high quality feature extraction from books (which would be even more valuable imo, than having better algorithms working on worse data). LLMs can certainly help with that, but that's just one domain.

And that would be a bespoke solution for just books, which would, if worked, would work with a standard search bar, no LLM needed in the final product.

We would need people to solve every domain for recommendation, whereas a group of knowledgeable humans can give you great tips on every domain they're familiar with on what to read, watch, buy to fix your leaky roof, etc.

So in essence, what you suggest would amount to giving up on LLMs (except as helpers for data curation and feature extraction) and going back to things we know work.