alt Hacker NewsYeah I bumped on that too. If it's possible to make llms cheaper than current grep, then it is also almost certainly possible to make grep cheaper.
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grep is deterministic. Llm is probabilistic. Llm can be transferred to a tiny quantum cpu or a lower precision float.
When the author wrote Llm can be as cheap as a tool, I read it as not equivalent. They even said the Llm can be embedded into a tool.
Their point was, the higher level use case — like classification — could become as cheap as grep. Which is quite well possible.
depends on what you are grepping ... greapping a large file might be more expensive one day than generating n-th token with LLM that works fully in hardware
you could make hardware implementation of grep and store the file itself next to it in some ROM but that's not a very useful grep ... while hardware LLM is exactly as useful as software LLM only orders of magnitude faster
You can burn anything* into an ASIC to make it cheaper per-call.
non-backreferencing grep is not very difficult to implement in an ASIC either. But it's probably not worth it because of how relatively rarely you use it and of the data transfer costs.
LLMs are great candidates for ASIC-burning because they're slow compared even to network speeds and run all the time. The issue is that you don't want to burn a specific model or architecture that then becomes obsolete.
So you've got two possible futures, and both guarantee large price drops: (a) LLMs keep getting better and better and better, so ability/$ keeps rising; or (b) LLMs plateau in ability, in which they will start getting ASIC'd.