we came to this by looking at how a "user profile" in plain english could be both used and generated by LLMs, but once we were looking at this we did discuss traditional recsys. Two things against it for this usecase: bootstrapping preferences with a low number of data points, and no "unified" storage of all users preferences or pre-existing dataset is difficult with trad ML or statistical methods. Also having your preferences or "model" if you will in plain english gives a sense of agency, transparency and individuality to your recomendataions that are at least difficult, if not impossible to communicate with other types of models.

Id love to have those assumptions challenged though, if there are examples you could point me towards.