[petercooper]

Analyzing firehoses of data. RSS feeds, releases, stuff like that. My job involves curating information and while I still do that process by hand, LLMs make my net larger and help me find more signals. This means hallucinations or mistakes aren't a big deal, since it all ends up with me anyway. I'm quite bullish on using LLMs as extra eyes, rather than as extra hands where they can run into trouble.

[captainbland]

Is cost a major consideration for you here? Like if you're dealing with firehose data which I'm assuming is fairly high throughput, do you see an incentive for potentially switching to a more specific NLP classifier model rather than sticking with generative LLMs? Or is it that this is good enough/the ROI of switching isn't attractive? Or is the generative aspect adding something else here?

[simonw]

If you do the calculations against the cheapest available models (GPT-4.1-nano and Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B and Amazon Nova Micro for example - I have a table on https://www.llm-prices.com/ ) it is shockingly inexpensive to process even really large volumes of text.

$20 could cover half a billion tokens with those models! That's a lot of firehose.

[BowBun]

I don't think everyone's using the term 'firehose' the same here. A child comment refers to half a billion tokens for $20.

I did some really basic napkin math with some Rails logs. One request with some extra junk in it was about 400 tokens according to the OpenAI tokenizer[0]. 500M/400 = ~1.25 million log lines.

Paying linearly for logs at $20 per 1.25 million lines is not reasonable for mid-to-high scale tech environments.

I think this would be sufficient if a 'firehose of data' is a bunch of news/media/content feeds that needs to be summarized/parsed/guessed at.

[0] https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

[petercooper]

No. It's a tiny expense. I mostly use GPT 4.1 Mini for what I'm doing as it's the best balance between results and cost, but Gemini Flash can do the job just as well for a little less if I need it.

As other commenters have mentioned, a firehose can mean many things. For me it might be thousands of different reasonably small things a day which is dollars a day even in the worst case. If you were processing the raw X feed or the whole of Reddit or something, then all of your questions certainly become more relevant :-)

[captainbland]

Yeah that makes sense based on those specifics, thanks

[scarface_74]

I can’t tell you what I’m working on but I can give you a real world example of where traditional models don’t work well.

Sentiment analysis is like the “Hello World” when you’re using Machine Learning.

But I had a use case similar to a platform like Uber eats where someone can be critical of the service provider or be critical of the platform itself. I needed to be able to distinguish sentiment about the platform based on reviews and sentiment about someone on the platform.

No matter what you do, people are going to conflate the reviews.

As far as costs, I mentioned in another comment that I work with online call centers sometimes. There anytime a person has to answer a call, it costs the company from $2-$5.

One call deflection that saves the company $5 can pay for a lot of inference. It’s literally 100x cheaper at least to use an LLM.