Wednesday, 10th April 2024
Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool (via) Martin Heinz drops a wealth of knowledge about ways to configure zsh (the default shell on macOS these days) to get better utility from your shell history. # 11:17 pm
Notes on how to use LLMs in your product. A whole bunch of useful observations from Will Larson here. I love his focus on the key characteristic of LLMs that “you cannot know whether a given response is accurate”, nor can you calculate a dependable confidence score for a response—and as a result you need to either “accept potential inaccuracies (which makes sense in many cases, humans are wrong sometimes too) or keep a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) to validate the response.” # 11:14 pm
The challenge [with RAG] is that most corner-cutting solutions look like they’re working on small datasets while letting you pretend that things like search relevance don’t matter, while in reality relevance significantly impacts quality of responses when you move beyond prototyping (whether they’re literally search relevance or are better tuned SQL queries to retrieve more appropriate rows). This creates a false expectation of how the prototype will translate into a production capability, with all the predictable consequences: underestimating timelines, poor production behavior/performance, etc.
— Will Larson # 11:09 pm
Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes)
I’m a bit behind on my weeknotes, so there’s a lot to cover here. But first... a review of the last 24 hours of Large Language Model news. All times are in US Pacific on April 9th 2024.
[... 1401 words]Gemini 1.5 Pro public preview (via) Huge release from Google: Gemini 1.5 Pro—the GPT-4 competitive model with the incredible 1 million token context length—is now available without a waitlist in 180+ countries (including the USA but not Europe or the UK as far as I can tell)... and the API is free for 50 requests/day (rate limited to 2/minute).
Beyond that you’ll need to pay—$7/million input tokens and $21/million output tokens, which is slightly less than GPT-4 Turbo and a little more than Claude 3 Sonnet.
They also announced audio input (up to 9.5 hours in a single prompt), system instruction support and a new JSON mod. # 2:38 am
Mistral tweet a magnet link for mixtral-8x22b. Another open model release from Mistral using their now standard operating procedure of tweeting out a raw torrent link.
This one is an 8x22B Mixture of Experts model. Their previous most powerful openly licensed release was Mixtral 8x7B, so this one is a whole lot bigger (a 281GB download)—and apparently has a 65,536 context length, at least according to initial rumors on Twitter. # 2:31 am