The author observes that a call to GPT-5.6 Luna is only 4-5 orders of magnitude more expensive than grep, and then predicts that at current rates of progress, calling an LLM will soon be cheaper than a grep. I think this is a good time to invoke Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." These efficiency improvements won't continue forever. It's more likely that the per-call cost of high-quality, compiled software like grep will be a lower-bound that LLMs asymptotically approach, rather than a line that they blow past with perpetual exponential progress. (Barring a true breakthrough in something like quantum computing or room-temperature superconductors.)
Yeah 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.
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
jetrink · · focus · HN ↗
The author observes that a call to GPT-5.6 Luna is only 4-5 orders of magnitude more expensive than grep, and then predicts that at current rates of progress, calling an LLM will soon be cheaper than a grep. I think this is a good time to invoke Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." These efficiency improvements won't continue forever. It's more likely that the per-call cost of high-quality, compiled software like grep will be a lower-bound that LLMs asymptotically approach, rather than a line that they blow past with perpetual exponential progress. (Barring a true breakthrough in something like quantum computing or room-temperature superconductors.)
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
scotty79 · · focus · HN ↗
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
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗