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Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

kenkantzer.com

31–40 of 179 posts

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#31

If you used better prompts you could use a less expensive model. "return nothing if you find nothing" is the level 0 version of giving the LLM an out. Give it a softer out ("in the event that you do not have sufficient information to make conclusive statements, you may hypothesize as long as you state clearly that you are doing so, and note the evidence and logical basis for your hypothesis") then ask it to evaluate…

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Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#32

> We consistently found that not enumerating an exact list or instructions in the prompt produced better results Not sure if he means training here or using his product. I think the latter. My end-user exp of GPT3.5 is that I need to be - not just precise but the exact flavor of precise. It's usually after some trial and error. Then more error. Then more trial. Getting a useful result on the 1st or 3rd try happens ma…

OP uses GPT4 mostly. Another poster here observed that "the opposite is required for 3.5" -- so i think your experience makes sense.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#33
Same here: I’m subscribed to all three top dogs in LLM space, and routinely issue the same prompts to all three. It’s very one sided in favor of GPT4 which is stunning since it’s now a year old, although of course it received a couple of updates in that time. Also at least with my usage patterns hallucinations are rare, too. In comparison Claude will quite readily hallucinate plausible looking APIs that don’t exist when writing code, etc. GPT4 is also more stubborn / less agreeable when it knows it’s right. Very little of this is captured in metrics, so you can only see it from personal experience.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#34
post #17

The biggest realisation for me while making ChatBotKit has been that UX > Model alone. For me, the current state of AI is not about questions and answers. This is dumb. The presentation matters. This is why we are now investing in generative UI.

How are you using Generative UI?

Sorry, not much to show at the moment. It is also pretty new so it is early days.

You can find some open-source examples here https://github.com/chatbotkit. More coming next week.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#35
post #33

Same here: I’m subscribed to all three top dogs in LLM space, and routinely issue the same prompts to all three. It’s very one sided in favor of GPT4 which is stunning since it’s now a year old, although of course it received a couple of updates in that time. Also at least with my usage patterns hallucinations are rare, too. In comparison Claude will quite readily hallucinate plausible looking APIs that don’t exist w…

This was with Claude Opus, vs. one of the lesser variants? I really like Opus for English copy generation.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#36
> But the problem is even worse – we often ask GPT to give us back a list of JSON objects. Nothing complicated mind you: think, an array list of json tasks, where each task has a name and a label.

> GPT really cannot give back more than 10 items. Trying to have it give you back 15 items? Maybe it does it 15% of the time.

This is just a prompt issue. I've had it reliably return up to 200 items in correct order. The trick is to not use lists at all but have JSON keys like "item1":{...} in the output. You can use lists as the values here if you have some input with 0-n outputs.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#37

If you used better prompts you could use a less expensive model. "return nothing if you find nothing" is the level 0 version of giving the LLM an out. Give it a softer out ("in the event that you do not have sufficient information to make conclusive statements, you may hypothesize as long as you state clearly that you are doing so, and note the evidence and logical basis for your hypothesis") then ask it to evaluate…

Yeah also prompts should not be developed in abstract. Goal of a prompt is to activate the models internal respentations for it to best achieve the task. Without automated methods, this requires iteratively testing the models reaction to different input and trying to understand how it's interpreting the request and where it's falling down and then patching up those holes. Need to verify if it even knows what you mean…

In the end, it comes down to a task similar to people management where giving clear and simple instructions is the best.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#38
post #6
post #3

For a few uni/personal projects I noticed the same about Langchain: it's good at helping you use up tokens. The other use case, quickly switching between models, is a very valid reason still. However, I've recently started playing with OpenRouter which seems to abstract the model nicely.

If someone were to create something new, a blank slate approach, what would you find valuable and why?

Use a local model. For most tasks they are good enough. Let's say Mistral 0.2 instruct is quite solid by now.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#40
Agree largely with author, but this ‘wait for OpenAI to do it’ sentiment is not something valid. Opus for example is already much better (not only per my experience, but like… researchers evaluaiton). And even for the fun of it - try some local inference, boy. If u know how to prompt it you definitely would be able to run local for the same tasks.

Like listening to my students all going to ‘call some API’ for their projects is really very sad to hear. Many startup fellows share this sentiment which a totally kills all the joy.

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