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I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

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Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can reduce hallucinations with appropriate grounding checks. You can’t really get rid of them though, so feedback loops with verification are essential.

Error percentages compound. Having an LLM do something with a 5% hallucination rate, then having an LLM (same or different) with a 5% error rate check it means there's a 10% chance of error, not .25%. Prompting can't save you here; it's the fundamental math.

How errors add depend upon how you treat them.

Two independent task? You have a 95% chance of each task being correct, so total success is .95^2 = 90.25% correct.

Having two AIs verify the same task with each being 95% correct? That's a 5% error per each, so 1-(.05^2) = 99.75% correct.

That is assuming fully independent error rates, which is the real issue. If it is pure hallucinations, then that is an okay assumption, but if there are issues in the underlying prompt/data causing the error rates, then it becomes a very dangerous assumption and I think more human involvement is recommended to better understand and resolve the underlying data problem.

The real interesting bit is that more AI's mean the 2 in the above equations gets bigger, so the error rate gets worse or better depending upon which equation is in play. So if you are in an in-between landscape where you aren't sure there is independence or not (or how much independence between errors), it also becomes unclear if more AI makes the error rate better or worse.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#212
post #8

Been through this exact loop building an LLM product. The counterintuitive lesson for me: most "token saving" ideas are cache killers — anything that makes the prompt prefix dynamic (rotating retrieval, appending context per turn) can cost more than the tokens it saves, because you lose the cached-prefix discount. Freezing the retrieval selection early in a conversation and paying a slightly larger fixed prefix beat…

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Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what did you ship?

I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down. Fixed small several bugs last week without even open the editor. It wrote tests that co…

> I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down.

so, basically did some vague, almost incomprehensible stuff. seems par for the course.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#215
post #93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Cause I don't have any quality user-facing documentation yet; that README is for bots. None of the interfaces have had a chance to settle, so any time spent accurately and humanely documenting what the project is capable of right now is an investment I cannot afford. I figured most people would just give it over to their favorite LLM with whatever instructions they prefer for translation because that's what I would'…

Wait so someone asked for something you made with AI that wasn't slop, and then you linked to something you knew was slop, and you said "I think this counts as something that isn't mere slop" and then when called out on it you admit you knew it was slop the whole time? This is a frequent pattern among AI users. What causes it?

I noticed this as well. A few days ago I was linked a game engine here when I similarly asked for proof and when I went to the repo and started reading it, the best way to describe it was keyword jargon soup and it seems to be the same for a lot of projects in this thread.

I think it's because it makes them seem...smarter? More technical? But they can't describe who it's for or what the actual design is without consulting an AI.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down. Fixed small several bugs last week without even open the editor. It wrote tests that co…

> I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down. so, basically did some vague, almost incomprehensible stuff. seems par for the course…

How was any of that incomprehensible? They gave a list of some actual things they shipped. The hand wavy dismissal where you pretend they didn’t say anything just exposes your bias. You don’t want to hear a success story so you don’t.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#217
post #54

TFA says "no hallucinations" but you can't fix hallucinations with rules or other models. I know I'm screaming into the void but whatever.

You can reduce hallucinations with appropriate grounding checks. You can’t really get rid of them though, so feedback loops with verification are essential.

Doing a loop and having the model review its own earlier output tends to solve this stuff, and for code requiring good test coverage catches them before they even hit that phase.

So while you can't remove "hallucinations" they're corrected before the process is complete, albeit at the cost of more tokens for verification.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#218
post #98
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlees you invest thousands your local ai won't even come close to the cheap cloud llms. Local is only worth it if you care about privacy or have a legitimate usage for the hardware otherwise. Money wise it isn't worth it

I think you bring up a good point about privacy. Companies probably should not be handing over intellectual property to cloud AI third party vendors. Perhaps all of that should stay on-prem and then the cloud vendors could be used to fill in the gaps.

Enterprises running in public clouds have Zero Data Retention policies with the vendor. Routing the ai spend through Azure or AWS usually bring these policies along with it, ie enterprise data and useage is not ingested to retrain the model.

Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#219
post #54

TFA says "no hallucinations" but you can't fix hallucinations with rules or other models. I know I'm screaming into the void but whatever.

I hear you! I read the article and thought the same thing because I've actually built a surprisingly similar pipeline myself, but it culminates with Human review. I've got a trivia app (Hedge Calibrated Trivia) whose whole content pipeline is built on a similar architecture of models evaluating models. I didn't want the same trivia that every other app has and I naively imagined that it would be easy to ask an LLM to…

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Re: I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

#220
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve used it for several improvements to our wysiwyg. I was able to refactor to a much more cohesive architecture that is making future work much easier/safer. We got a fzf like search algorithm for an autocomplete that includes marking which characters matched. It fixed some jank performance issues I was struggling to track down. so, basically did some vague, almost incomprehensible stuff. seems par for the course…

How was any of that incomprehensible? They gave a list of some actual things they shipped. The hand wavy dismissal where you pretend they didn’t say anything just exposes your bias. You don’t want to hear a success story so you don’t.

how do you ship a "wysiwyg"?

and my point is he is doing the hand-waving. i'm quite happy to hear success stories - we get so few concrete ones here.

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