LLMs are a general-purpose data solvent.

To extract structured data from unstructured input is extraordinarily expensive to do mechanistically.

Each scraper is specialized and very finely tuned to the input.

If the input changes shape even a little bit, the scraper breaks.

Data extraction is thus finicky, fragile, frustrating, expensive.

The only way to do it before was to have such a big audience that even paying an army of operators to create and maintain scrapers was worth it.

But now LLMs allow general extraction in a flexible, fluid way^[vx][vy].