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Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

kenkantzer.com

71–80 of 179 posts

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#71

> We always extract json. We don’t need JSON mode I wonder why? It seems to work pretty well for me. > Lesson 4: GPT is really bad at producing the null hypothesis Tell me about it! Just yesterday I was testing a prompt around text modification rules that ended with “If none of the rules apply to the text, return the original text without any changes”. Do you know ChatGPT’s response to a text where none of the rules…

AmeliaBedeliaGPT

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#72

The team I work on processes 5B+ tokens a month (and growing) and I'm the EM overseeing that. Here are my take aways 1. There are way too many premature abstractions. Langchain, as one of may examples, might be useful in the future but at the end of the day prompts are just a API call and it's easier to write standard code that treats LLM calls as a flaky API call rather than as a special thing. 2. Hallucinations are…

> Summarizing is pretty rock solid in my testing, but reasoning is really hard.

Asking for analogies has been interesting and surprisingly useful.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#73
post #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 p…

Claude does have more of a hallucination problem than GPT-4, and a less robust knowledge base.

It's much better at critical thinking tasks and prose.

Don't mistake benchmarks for real world performance across actual usecases. There's a bit of Goodhart's Law going on with LLM evaluation and optimization.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#75

I keep seeing this pattern in articles like this: 1. A recitation of terrible problems 2. A declaration of general satisfaction. Clearly and obviously, ChatGPT is an unreliable toy. The author seems pleased with it. As an engineer, I find that unacceptable.

Working with models like GPT-4 is frustrating from a traditional software engineering perspective because these systems are inherently unreliable and non-deterministic, which differs from most software tools that we use.

That doesn't mean they can't be incredibly useful - but it does mean you have to approach them in a bit of a different way, and design software around them that takes their unreliability into account.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#78
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…

Interesting, Claude 3 Opus has been better than GPT4 for me. Mostly in that I find it does a better (and more importantly, more thorough) job of explaining things to me. For coding tasks (I'm not asking it to write code, but instead to explain topics/code/etc to me) I've found it tends to give much more nuanced answers. When I give it long text to converse about, I find Claude Opus tends to have a much deeper understanding of the content it's given, where GPT4 tends to just summarize the text at hand, whereas Claude tends to be able to extrapolate better.

Re: Lessons after a Half-billion GPT Tokens

#80
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you sending tabular data in a reliable way. And what is the source document type? I'm trying to solve this for complex financial-related tables in PDFs right now.

Amazon Textract, to get tables, format them with Python as csv then send to your preferred AI model.

Thanks. How does Textract compare to come of the common cli utilities like pdftotext, tesseract, etc (if you made a comparison)?
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