I hope LLMs continue to commodify

2024-07-30

I admit that I'm a bit of an LLM skeptic. I'm a software developer. I just don't like the idea of handing over what's fun about my career to a few megacorps and their sock puppets. Yet I'm also a software consultant, which means that I have to run a business. Part of that is doing great work for my clients, and part of that is putting my feelings to the side and being as effective as I can be for them. Thus it is with great personal shame that I found myself leaning fully into using Perplexity, which is one of the more famous GPT wrappers that sprung up in the wake of the LLM rush.

It's just a chatbot that uses sources, but what it effectively does is compress what used to be fifteen to forty-five minutes of searching and reading into a few seconds. Apps like this are simply winners in my line of work. It's not a copilot. It's an intern, but the fastest one on the planet.

What excites me about the apps of this type is that there doesn't seem to be anything special about them. Perplexity use a Cloudflare turnstile on their site, presumably to bounce scripts looking to use them for free. For the first month or two, I tolerated it, but it began to truly irritate me when I worked on my Linux box.

So I just... left. I tested a few alternatives like Kagi FastGPT, which I had from my Kagi subscription, and Bing Copilot, which was free. Both were just as good for my specific problems. I was so pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to just ditch Perplexity when it started to annoy me. Especially with the rise of the "open" models, maybe my fears about the "new world" were overblown. Our jobs will still change, of course, but maybe we'll have more power than I thought.

I eventually settled on Phind, which has been excellent so far. It better keep its site turnstile-free.