Why Businesses Shouldn’t Treat LLMs as Databases

Despite the rise of AI, SaaS companies continue to play a crucial role, as large language models (LLMs) cannot function as databases. Sridhar Vembu, founder of Indian SaaS company Zoho, recently explained that neural networks “absorb” data in a way that makes it impossible to update, delete, or retrieve specific information accurately. According to Vembu, this is not just a technological challenge but a fundamental mathematical and scientific limitation of the current AI approach. He explained that if a business trains an LLM using its customer data, the model cannot update itself when a customer modifies or deletes their data. This is because there is no clear mapping between the original data and the trained parameters. Even if the model is dedicated to a single customer, there