While not an entirely unique perspective, I believe Apple is one of the best positioned companies to take advantage of the recent improvements in language models. I expect more generic chatbots will continue to become commodities whereas Apple will build a bespoke, multi-modal assistant with access to all your personal data on device. This assistant will be able to do anything the phone can do (invoke functions/tools) as well as answer any question about your personal data (show me photos from Christmas in 2018).A heartwarming exchange
Your project has a youthful optimism that I hope you won’t lose as you go. And in fact it might be the way to win in the long run.I downloaded warp today. I’ve been using iTerm2 for years. It’s worked well for me but Warp came recommended and so I figured I should be willing to give something different a chance. Warp looks like a pretty standard terminal except you need to sign-in, as with most things SaaS these days. It looks like the beta is free but there is a paid version for teams. Warp puts “workflows” as first class citizens of the editor experience.promptfoo is a Javascript library and CLI for testing and evaluating LLM output quality. It’s straightforward to install and get up and running quickly. As a first experiment, I’ve used it to compare the output of three similar prompts that specify their output structure using different modes of schema definition. To get started
mkdir prompt_comparison cd prompt_comparison promptfoo init The scaffold creates a prompts.txt file, and this is where I wrote a parameterized prompt to classify and extract data from a support message.I tried out Llama 2 today using ollama. At first pass, it seemed ok a writing Python code but I struggled to get it to effective generate or adhere to specific schema. I’ll have to try a few more things but my initial impressions are mixed (relative to OpenAI models).To broaden my knowledge of nix, I’m working through an Overview of the Nix Language.
Most of the data types and structures are relatively self-explanatory in the context of modern programming languages.
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'' s '' == "s " Functions are a bit unexpected visually, but simply enough with an accompanying explanation. For example, the following is a named function f with two arguments x and y.I started working through the Zero to Nix guide. This is a light introduction that touch on a few of the command line tools that come with nix and how they can be used to build local and remote projects and enter developer environments. While many of the examples are high level concept you’d probably apply when developing with nix, flake templates are one thing I could imagine returning to often.It’s hard to think because it’s hard to think.
- Github Copilot
Finally learned that RAG stands for “Retriever-Augmented Generation” after seeing it all over the place for months. Not sure how I missed that one.Meta released Llama 2 yesterday and the hype has ensued. While it’s exciting to see more powerful models become available, a model with weights is not the same as an API. It is still far less accessible.
A paper came out on the measurement of the degradation ChatGPT’s reasoning abilities. As real-time peer review took place over the course of the day on Twitter, the most compelling explanation that I heard to explain these findings was that OpenAI has further fine-tuned the models to respond in a manner consistent with the level of the prompt, because this is a better experience for the user.I’ve been following the “AI engineering framework” marvin for several months now. In addition to openai_function_call, it’s currently one of my favorite abstractions built on top of a language model. The docs are quite good, but as a quick demo, I’ve ported over a simplified version of an example from an earlier post, this time using marvin.
import json import marvin from marvin import ai_model from pydantic import ( BaseModel, ) from typing import ( List, ) marvin.