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Ha! To think that we're finally back to asking ourselves why we are using generative models for categorization and extraction. I wonder how much money has collectively been wasted by companies wittling away at square pegs.

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> why we are using generative models for categorization and extraction

Because LLM models have already amortized the man-years cost of collecting, curating and training on text corpuses?

They amortized the creation of corpuses with trainable features, not the myriad of methods that can categorize text with a success rate in the levels required by high-stakes industries.

Yeah, LLMs are a solution to the cold start problem plus they are easy to integrate and if you know what you're doing in terms of evals, post processing and so on you can get excellent performance out of them, plus they can do semantic classification and reasoning that you won't get out of some bespoke traditional DS/ML model.

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