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Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

> Data extraction/structuring data is the only serious application of LLMs

I fully agree. I realized this early on when experimenting with GPT-3 for web data extraction. After posting the first prototype on Reddit and HN, we started seeing a lot of demand for automating rule-based web scraping stacks (lots of maintenance, hard to scale). This eventually led to the creation of our startup (https://kadoa.com) focused on automating this "boring and hard" problem.

It comes down to such relatively unexciting use cases where AI adds the most value.

AI won't eliminate our jobs, but it will automate tedious, repetitive work such as web scraping, form filling, and data entry.

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The way you cut that quote turns it into an assertion that doesn't exist in parent post.

They didn't make the (incorrect) statement that no other serious, useful application exists.

But that's how it reads when you cut off before "I have actually engaged in for real work and found useful"

To be fair the original sentence could still be implying the same thing. The second half of the sentence just sounds like a hedge.

Well I precisely talked about things I have engaged professionally. Obviously this cannot cover everything one may do, eg I do not build chatbots for customer service or stuff like that, thus I obviously cannot speak for all possible applications of LLMs and how useful they may be. I am pretty sure there will be useful applications in fields I am not and will not be engaged in as nobody engages with everything. However, some other things that I have tried (eg copilots, summarising scientific articles) imo create much more hype than real value. They can be a bit useful if you know what to actually use them for and what their limits are, but nowhere close to the hype they generate, and I just find myself just googling again tbh. They are absolutely horrible especially with more niche subjects and areas. On the other hand, data extraction and structuring has a quite universal application, has already demonstrated usefulness and potential, and seems a quite realistic, down to earth application that I am happy to see other people and startups working on. Not as fancy, and harder to build hype upon, but very useful regardless.

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