Items tagged willlarson in Apr
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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.” # 10th April 2024, 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 # 10th April 2024, 11:09 pm
Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. [...] As a result you switch tools a lot, and your ability to migrate to new software can easily become the defining constraint for your overall velocity. [...] Migrations matter because they are usually the only available avenue to make meaningful progress on technical debt.
— Will Larson # 23rd April 2018, 3:03 pm