Langchain Is Pointless

Post by ntindle » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 2:43 AM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #113

TeMPOraL wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the reason I'm hesitant to release said blog post is because I don't want to be that asshole who criticizes open source software that's operating in good faith. Beyond the "extreme popularity of LangChain is warping the entire AI ecosystem around the workflows to the point of harming it", hasn't it recently become an attractor for substantial amount of investment money? I'm not saying you should be an ass a…

I'm not worried about LangChain not taking criticism well, it's more the fanboys who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and I don't have the free time to deal with annoying "you're just nitpicking because you're jealous" and "it's open source, why don't you just make a PR to fix everything instead of whining?" messages.

Post by krawczstef » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 4:20 AM UTC

ibains wrote: post #59

jangletown wrote: post #56

I agree, I really don’t like LangChain abstractions, the chains they say are “composable” are not really, you spend more time trying to figure out langchain than actually building things with it, and it seems it’s not just me after talking to many people Their code seems all rushed, and seems it worked out for initial popularity, but with their current abstractions I personally don’t think it’s a good long term frame…

Why is this just not ETL, why do you need anything here? There is no new category or product needed here.

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:31 AM UTC

RC_ITR wrote: post #90

senko wrote: post #39

Remember, this is the project that raised ~$30m from Benchmark and Sequoia. There was a controversial "quality doesn't matter for software products" post and discussion[0] here on HN a few days ago and this is a beautiful example. Product may matter eventually, but you can sure surf the hype for a long time before the reckoning comes (and if you're lucky, you may even be able to get someone else to hold the bag then)…

We’ve seen the top dog fall from grace in the VC world before (KPCB missing social and mobile after a truly epic run in the 90s) Is that what we are starting to see for Sequoia? Like KP, I doubt they’ll fold, but it would be interesting to live in a world where sequoia is just top half instead of top 1.

Post by rchaves » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 5:34 AM UTC

rchaves wrote: post #134

LASR wrote: post #85

The reason why Langchain is pointless is that it's trying to solve problems on top of technical foundations that just cannot support it. The #1 learning is that there is no reusability with the current generation of LLMs. We're using GPT-4 and 3.5T exclusively. Over the last several months, my team has been building several features using highly sophisticated LLM chains that do all manner of reasoning. The ultimate o…

100% this! What is worse is that LangChain hides their prompts away, I had to read the source code and mess with private variables of nested classes just to change a single prompt from something like RetrievalQA, and not only that, the default prompt they use is actually bad, they are lucky things work because GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are damn smart machines, with any other open LLM, things break. I was hoping for good defa…

Post by rchaves » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 6:17 AM UTC

ibains wrote: post #59

jangletown wrote: post #56

I agree, I really don’t like LangChain abstractions, the chains they say are “composable” are not really, you spend more time trying to figure out langchain than actually building things with it, and it seems it’s not just me after talking to many people Their code seems all rushed, and seems it worked out for initial popularity, but with their current abstractions I personally don’t think it’s a good long term frame…

Why is this just not ETL, why do you need anything here? There is no new category or product needed here.