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Building an email-to-calendar LLM

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Re: Building an email-to-calendar LLM

#42
post #12

Just use CALDAV; it's designed for making calendar entries automatically via email. I'm not hip with the fashion for putting an LLM into everything. I think it's lazy.

That's a great solution to a different problem. Unless caldav has a process for extracting dates and actions from unstructured emails? But that doesn't seem related to caldav.

Point taken; you do need a CALDAV client to source or consume CALDAV messages, which are indeed very much structured.

Re: Building an email-to-calendar LLM

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK about "lazy", but it's certainly an extremely expensive solution.

Isn't the expensive part of LLM's the training? My understanding is once they are trained they can often be optimized to run quite cheaply. Not as cheaply as a well designed program but cheaply enough it shouldn't be too prohibitive to run.

I'd love to be shown I'm wrong; but I thought most 'runtime' LLMs required a shit-ton of memory. Just downloading one seems to require more storage than I have on this laptop.

Re: Building an email-to-calendar LLM

#44
I simplify my prioritization strategies to use only 2 priorities: High (do it now) and Low (do it later). There should only be 1 high-priority item at any time, and when it's completed, the (next) low-priority item becomes the single high-priority item.

Maintaining multi-level priorities requires more decisions to evaluate relative priorities of different tasks and possible priority re-evaluation when new tasks arrive. Throw some colleagues, friends or others into the mix and agreements on the decisions become more distant.

Within the low-priority list these are sorted on the date and time required. If you then choose to ignore the priorities or sorting, the deviation will take you down the priority re-evaluation rabbit hole again. It's then your choice to follow the process, or not. Avoiding adding complexity to task scheduling and processes ensures I have focus.

Of course, this will not be for everyone. Good luck with that LLM!

Re: Building an email-to-calendar LLM

#45

"Setting up LLMs to output structured data is incredibly hard." resonated strongly with my experience working in similar one-off projects. I've almost always implemented some level of fuzzy-matching to validate and convert the LLM output back into my expected structured format. I've also noticed that the LLMs are much better at writing code than structured JSON (no real surprise given the popularity of code assistant…

As long as you can sanitize the LLM output somehow. You should never `eval` LLM code straight from the tap!

You shouldn't sanitize, if you're taking the approach described above, you should run it inside a minimal interpreter that doesn't implement any potentially dangerous APIs.

Re: Building an email-to-calendar LLM

#46
post #41

The fact that GPT could reliably produce the right JSON structure but an open model couldn't is fascinating to me. It's impressive how far ahead OpenAI is.

How is this fascinating? One is a 175-1000+B parameter model the other is 3-70B parameter model.

I’m allowed to find it fascinating, that’s why.
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