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Items tagged promptengineering in Apr, 2024

Filters: Year: 2024 × Month: Apr × promptengineering × Sorted by date


mistralai/mistral-common. New from Mistral: mistral-common, an open source Python library providing "a set of tools to help you work with Mistral models".

So far that means a tokenizer! This is similar to OpenAI's tiktoken library in that it lets you run tokenization in your own code, which crucially means you can count the number of tokens that you are about to use - useful for cost estimates but also for cramming the maximum allowed tokens in the context window for things like RAG.

Mistral's library is better than tiktoken though, in that it also includes logic for correctly calculating the tokens needed for conversation construction and tool definition. With OpenAI's APIs you're currently left guessing how many tokens are taken up by these advanced features.

Anthropic haven't published any form of tokenizer at all - it's the feature I'd most like to see from them next.

Here's how to explore the vocabulary of the tokenizer:

MistralTokenizer.from_model(
    "open-mixtral-8x22b"
).instruct_tokenizer.tokenizer.vocab()[:12]

['<unk>', '<s>', '</s>', '[INST]', '[/INST]', '[TOOL_CALLS]', '[AVAILABLE_TOOLS]', '[/AVAILABLE_TOOLS]', '[TOOL_RESULTS]', '[/TOOL_RESULTS]'] # 18th April 2024, 12:39 am

In mid-March, we added this line to our system prompt to prevent Claude from thinking it can open URLs:

“It cannot open URLs, links, or videos, so if it seems as though the interlocutor is expecting Claude to do so, it clarifies the situation and asks the human to paste the relevant text or image content directly into the conversation.”

Alex Albert (Anthropic) # 18th April 2024, 12:22 am

Lessons after a half-billion GPT tokens (via) Ken Kantzer presents some hard-won experience from shipping real features on top of OpenAI’s models.

They ended up settling on a very basic abstraction over the chat API—mainly to handle automatic retries on a 500 error. No complex wrappers, not even JSON mode or function calling or system prompts.

Rather than counting tokens they estimate tokens as 3 times the length in characters, which works well enough.

One challenge they highlight for structured data extraction (one of my favourite use-cases for LLMs): “GPT really cannot give back more than 10 items. Trying to have it give you back 15 items? Maybe it does it 15% of the time.”

(Several commenters on Hacker News report success in getting more items back by using numbered keys or sequence IDs in the returned JSON to help the model keep count.) # 13th April 2024, 8:54 pm

Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus

files-to-prompt is a new tool I built to help me pipe several files at once into prompts to LLMs such as Claude and GPT-4.

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