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.

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serbuvlad an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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hobofan 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> LLMs plateau in ability, in which they will start getting ASIC'd.

They don't need to plateu for that to happen. There are companies already building AI on ASIC, and IIRC they were approach 12 months lead time. A 12 months old frontier model (Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5, Kimi K2) for 1% of the price is still a rather good value proposition.

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thenthenthen 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This whole story really reminds me of crypto coins. Like.. going from mining one coin, or lets say token, to millions of fractions like 0.00000000001 bitcoin a week.

	▲	pixl97 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There is a reason it took 4 and a half billion years for human intelligence to develop.

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scotty79 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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