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As I explained below, I avoided having to learn anything about ML, PyTorch or any other APIs when trying to classify posts based on how political they were and which affiliation they were. That was holding me back and it was easily replaced by an llm and a prompt. Literally took me minutes what would have taken days or weeks and the results are more than good enough.

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> what would have taken days or weeks

Nah, searching Stackoverflow and Github doesn't take "weeks".

That said, due to how utterly broken internet search is nowadays, using an LLM as a search engine proxy is viable.

GPT 3.5 is more accurate at classifying tweets as liberal than it is at identifying posts that are conservative.

If you're going for rough approximation, LLMs are great, and good enough. More care and conventional ML methods are appropriate as the stakes increase though.

GPT 3.5 has been very, very obsolete in terms of price-per-performance for over a year. Bit of a straw man.

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