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Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations

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Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations

#1
Hello HN!

I've been thinking about the idea of a LLM thats a clone of me - instead of generating replies to be a helpful assistant, it generates replies that are exactly like mine. The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige), and I think with LLMs, there might actually be a possibility of us doing something like this!

I've just released a fork of the facebookresearch/llama-recipes which allows you to fine-tune a Llama model on your personal WhatsApp conversations. This adaptation can train the model (using QLoRA) to respond in a way that's eerily similar to your own texting style.

What I've figured out so far:

Quick Learning: The model quickly adapts to personal nuances, emoji usage, and phrases that you use. I've trained just 1 epoch on a P100 GPU using QLoRA and 4 bit quantization, and its already captured my mannerisms

Turing Tests: As an experiment, I asked my friends to ask me 3 questions, and responded with 2 candidate responses (one from me and one from llama). My friends then had to guess which candidate response was mine and which one was Llama's. Llama managed to fool 10% of my friends, but with more compute, I think it can do way better.

Here's the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Ads-cmu/WhatsApp-Llama/

Would love to hear feedback, suggestions, and any cool experiences if you decide to give it a try! I'd love to see how far we can push this by training bigger models for more epochs (I ran out of compute credits)

Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations
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Re: Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations

#4
Nice. I remember thinking of doing something like this when I was much much more of a novice. I wrote a WhatsApp message parser and thought of doing this with the parsed messages. Unfortunately I knew too little back then, and Llama didn't exist either. Cool to see it!

Re: Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations

#5
You said that the model fooled your friends 10% of the time.

I wonder how well would chatGPT | llama2 do given just the last 5 messages of each and asking to generate the next reply pre tending to be you…

Somehow I don’t think it would be worse?

Re: Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations

#8
> The concept's appeared in fiction numerous times (the talking paintings in Harry Potter that mimic the person painted, the clones in The Prestige)

How is your most notable example not when Gilfoyle does exactly this so he doesn’t have to talk to Dinesh in Silicon Valley??

Re: Show HN: WhatsApp-Llama: A clone of yourself from your WhatsApp conversations

#10
Super cool! I had a similar idea where I wanted to create such clones of some of my friends (with consent ofc) and see how well they know me. To extend your clone even more, you can also throw in every piece of digital text you have into this, eg. emails, notes, essays, blogs etc. I'm super down to work on LLM clones like these!

edit: I actually started a little work on this. If you wanna export more messages than the limited 40k, you can use [0]. I did and I have every text I've ever sent since I had WhatsApp.

[0]: https://github.com/YuvrajRaghuvanshiS/WhatsApp-Key-Database-...

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