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> But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets

Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.

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It depends on the specific task.

For example: "Here our dataset that contains customer feedback comment fields; look through them, draw out themes, associations, and look for trends." Solving that with a deterministic program isn't a trivial problem, and it is likely cheaper solved via LLM.

It makes sense if the dataset is so large that LLM cost is a prohibitive factor. Otherwise a frontier LLM has the advantage of producing a better result.

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