10 years ago, I started an ML & NLP consulting firm. Back then nobody was doing NLP in production (SpaCy hadn't come out yet, efficient vector embeddings were not around, the only comprehensive library to do NLP was NLTK, which was academic and hard to run in prod).
I recently revisited some of our projects from back then (like this super fun one where we put 1 Million words into the dictionary [1]) and realized how much faster we could have done many of those tasks with LLMs.
Except we couldn't — the whole "in production" part would have made LLMs for the most minute tasks prohibitively expensive, and that is not going to change for a while, sadly. So, if you want to work something in prod that is not specifically an LLM application, this book is still super valuable.
10 years ago, I started an ML & NLP consulting firm. Back then nobody was doing NLP in production (SpaCy hadn't come out yet, efficient vector embeddings were not around, the only comprehensive library to do NLP was NLTK, which was academic and hard to run in prod).
I recently revisited some of our projects from back then (like this super fun one where we put 1 Million words into the dictionary [1]) and realized how much faster we could have done many of those tasks with LLMs.
Except we couldn't — the whole "in production" part would have made LLMs for the most minute tasks prohibitively expensive, and that is not going to change for a while, sadly. So, if you want to work something in prod that is not specifically an LLM application, this book is still super valuable.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/technology/scouring-the-w...