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TypeChat

microsoft.github.io

81–90 of 174 posts

Re: TypeChat

#81
post #72

This is my hot take: we're slowly entering the "tooling" phase of AI, where people realize there's no real value generation here, but people are so heavily invested in AI, that money is still being pumped into building stuff (and of course, it's one of the best way to guarantee your academic paper gets published). I mean, LangChain is kind of a joke and they raised $10M seed lol. DeFi/crypto went through this phase 2…

When I use ChatGPT I feel like I'm looking at a different technology than other people. It's supposed to be able to answer every question and teach me anything, but in practice it turns out to be a content-farm-as-a-service (CFaaS?) Copilot is similar, it's usually easier for me to write the code than iterate through it to find the least bad example and then fix the bugs. That said, AlphaGo went from "hallucinating"…

> That said, AlphaGo went from "hallucinating" bad moves to the best player in the world in a fairly short period of time. If this is at all doable for language models, GPT-x may blow all this out of the water.

I think the state space when looking at something like Go v. natural language (or even formal languages like programming languages or first/second order logic) is not even remotely comparable. The number of states in Go is 3^361. The number of possible sentences in English, while technically infinite, has some sensible estimates (Googling shows the relatively tame 10^570 figure).

Re: TypeChat

#82
post #72

This is my hot take: we're slowly entering the "tooling" phase of AI, where people realize there's no real value generation here, but people are so heavily invested in AI, that money is still being pumped into building stuff (and of course, it's one of the best way to guarantee your academic paper gets published). I mean, LangChain is kind of a joke and they raised $10M seed lol. DeFi/crypto went through this phase 2…

> DeFi/crypto went through this phase 2 years ago.

A key difference is that these things, no matter how impressive their technical merits, required people to completely reshape whatever they were doing to get the first bit of benefit.

Modern AI (and really, usually LLMs) has immediate and broad applicability across nearly every economic sector, and that's why so many of us are already building and releasing features with it. There's incredible value in this stuff. Completely world-changing? No. But enough to create new product categories and fundamentally improve large swaths of existing product capabilities? Absolutely.

Re: TypeChat

#83
post #72

This is my hot take: we're slowly entering the "tooling" phase of AI, where people realize there's no real value generation here, but people are so heavily invested in AI, that money is still being pumped into building stuff (and of course, it's one of the best way to guarantee your academic paper gets published). I mean, LangChain is kind of a joke and they raised $10M seed lol. DeFi/crypto went through this phase 2…

Hard disagree on AI being just a bubble with limited applicability.

> It won't be able to self-drive cars due to all the edge cases, it won't be able to perform surgeries because it might kill people, etc.

You literally just cherry-picked the most difficult applications of AI. The vast majority of peoples' jobs don't involve life or death, and thus are ripe for automation. And even if the life or death jobs retain a human element, they will most certainly be augmented by AI agents. For example a surgery might still be handled by a human, but it will probably become mandatory for a doctor or nurse to diagnose a patient in conjunction with an AI.

> We went through a similar bubble a few years ago with chatbots

Are you honestly comparing that to now? ChatGPT got to 100 million users in a few months and everyone and their grandma has used it. I wasn't even aware of any chatbot bubble a few years ago, it certainly wasn't that significant.

> even the most useful AI tools (Copilot, etc.) are marginally useful at best

Sure, but you're literally seeing them in their worst versions. ChatGPT has been a life-changer for me, and it doesn't even execute code yet (Code Interpreter does though, which I haven't tested yet)

By 2030 humans probably won't be typing code anymore, it'll just be prompting machines and directing AI agents. By then most peoples' jobs will also be automated.

AI isn't just some fad, it's going to change literally every industry, and way faster than people think. The cynicism here trying to dismiss the implications of AI by comparing it to the metaverse are just absurd and utterly lacking in imagination. Yes there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, specifically in the AI agent side of things, but we will get there, probably way faster than people realize, and the implications are enormous.

Re: TypeChat

#84
post #72

This is my hot take: we're slowly entering the "tooling" phase of AI, where people realize there's no real value generation here, but people are so heavily invested in AI, that money is still being pumped into building stuff (and of course, it's one of the best way to guarantee your academic paper gets published). I mean, LangChain is kind of a joke and they raised $10M seed lol. DeFi/crypto went through this phase 2…

Hard disagree on AI being just a bubble with limited applicability. > It won't be able to self-drive cars due to all the edge cases, it won't be able to perform surgeries because it might kill people, etc. You literally just cherry-picked the most difficult applications of AI. The vast majority of peoples' jobs don't involve life or death, and thus are ripe for automation. And even if the life or death jobs retain a…

[deleted]

Re: TypeChat

#85

I don't see the value add here. Here's the core of the message sent to the LLM: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeChat/blob/main/src/typechat... You are basically getting a fixed prompt to return structured data with a small amount of automation and vendor lockin. All these LLM libraries are just crappy APIs to the underlying API. It is trivial to write a script that does the same and will be much more flexible as mod…

Where's the vendor lock-in? This is an open source library and the file you linked to even includes configs for two vendors: ChatGPT and Bard.

vendor lock in to a library and the design choices they make

basically, since it reduces the user input space, you are giving up flexibility and control for some questionably valuable abstractions, such as a predefined prompt, no ability to prompt engineer, CoT/ToT, etc...

if anything, choose a broader framework like langchain and have something like this an extension or plugin to the framework, no need for a library for this one little thing

Re: TypeChat

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This as a dynamic mapper in a backend layer can be huge. For example, try to keep up with (frequent) API payload changes around a consumer in Java. We implemented a NodeJS layer just to stay sane. (Banking, huge JSON payloads, backends in Java) Mapping is really something LLMs could shine.

It could shine, or it could be an absolute disaster. Code/functionality archeology is already insanely hard in orgs with old codebases. Imagine the facepalming that Future You will have when you see that the way the system works is some sort of nondeterministic translation layer that magically connects two APIs where versions are allowed to fluctuate.

I think it's ironic that some people are saying the likes of Chat GPT will make software engineers obsolete when in reality there will be huge demand for the humans that will eventually be needed to clean up messes just like this.

Re: TypeChat

#87

I don't see the value add here. Here's the core of the message sent to the LLM: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeChat/blob/main/src/typechat... You are basically getting a fixed prompt to return structured data with a small amount of automation and vendor lockin. All these LLM libraries are just crappy APIs to the underlying API. It is trivial to write a script that does the same and will be much more flexible as mod…

Yes as the abstractions gets better it becomes easier to code useful things.

the debate is about how valuable the abstraction here is to warrant a library, and the fact that it predefines the prompt and api call flow, so you cannot prompt engineer or use something like CoT/ToT

Re: TypeChat

#88
post #69

I don't see the value add here. Here's the core of the message sent to the LLM: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeChat/blob/main/src/typechat... You are basically getting a fixed prompt to return structured data with a small amount of automation and vendor lockin. All these LLM libraries are just crappy APIs to the underlying API. It is trivial to write a script that does the same and will be much more flexible as mod…

It’s essentially prompt engineering as a service with some basic quality-control features thrown in. Sure, your engineers could implement it themselves, but don’t they have better things to do?

the quality of the prompt does not look that good from my experience reaching flexible structured output based on a schema

There are other questionable decisions and a valuable use of engineering time is indeed to evaluate candidate abstractions and think about the long-term cost of adopting them. In this case, it does not seem like it saves that much effort and in the long run means a lot of important LLM knobs are out of your control. Not a good tradeoff

Re: TypeChat

#89

I don't see the value add here. Here's the core of the message sent to the LLM: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeChat/blob/main/src/typechat... You are basically getting a fixed prompt to return structured data with a small amount of automation and vendor lockin. All these LLM libraries are just crappy APIs to the underlying API. It is trivial to write a script that does the same and will be much more flexible as mod…

Getting these models to reliably return a consistent structure without frequent human intervention and/or having to account for the personal moral opinions of big tech CEOs is not trivial, no.

There are multiple ways to get structured output, and what this library is doing is not really that interesting. The concept is interesting and has had multiple implementations already, the code (and abstraction) here is not interesting and creates more issues than it solves

Re: TypeChat

#90
Anyone knows in what situations this approach is superior to jsonformer (https://github.com/1rgs/jsonformer) and vice versa?

Or are they solving different problems?

It seems jsonformer has some advantages such as only generating tokens for the values and not the structure of the JSON. But this project seems to have more of a closed feedback loop prompt the model to do the right thing.

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