Just because you can do it with an LLM, doesn’t mean you should.

AI is starting to look a lot like early cloud in that it is an exciting new platform that many people want to take advantage of.

But just like early cloud, this is a new platform for building things and requires new ways of thinking. And also just like early cloud using this new platform naively can be incredibly costly.

Take something simple like searching for lines matching a pattern in a file. I asked ChatGPT how to do this using the OpenAI API:

https://lnkd.in/eEkY5EJc

This same task could be accomplished using a very common utility on unix called grep. Using this command will have negligible cost and many orders of magnitude less environmental impact.

This is, of course, an extreme example for the sake of argument, but this miraculous new platform has many more subtle use cases that can have about as big an impact.

Just as cloud needs to be architected for cost and sustainability so will AI.