March 07, 2025 | An LLM ("AI") Stochastic Parrot in the Sheets (SPITS)

I just want a Google Sheets formula function that lets me ask an LLM about some of the data in my file.

Surprisingly, Google has yet to implement this, so I made one^[1].

If you have a Google Sheet with data like this:

Then you can use the spits formula function to ask a question about the data:

=spits("How much did I spend on food in total? How much in November?",A1:C7)

And whatever cell you put that formula in will then have a response like:

Here's the breakdown of your food spending:

Total Spending: The only items clearly identifiable as food are Milk, Gum, Bananas, and Cereal. Toothpaste is debatable. Assuming only the clear food items, your total food spending is 3.49 + 0.99 + 2.99 + 5.99 = $13.46

November Spending: Your November food spending (Bananas and Cereal) was 2.99 + 5.99 = $8.98

For my consulting clients, I've used this to quickly take the terrible .csv files that sales and marketing people get from tradeshow booth scans or webinar events, to then clean and format the list of prospects for insertion in to Salesforce or another tool. I used it to impute and normalize job titles into job functions and seniority levels, I extracted and accurately separated First and Last names, and looked up websites for companies names - without paying extra to a data vendor. I've also explored what this could look like as part of the data quality pipeline.

I've used this personally to analyze my stock portfolio and suggest improvements I should discuss with a financial advisor, and to analyze my expenses and build a cash flow projection for the next 6 months, etc.

This functionality is different than, and in my opinion, appears to be more useful than what Google offers for $20/month.

Another feature is that the AI safety filters are turned off, unlike the Google Gemini web app.

This does come with some limitations, namely the number of API calls that your formula can make in a minute and a day. Read the documentation provided in the Github repo: https://github.com/iwyatt/spits

If you use this or have suggestions for improvement, I'd love to hear from you:
https://hachyderm.io/@iw