Nor do the majority of "AI" experts and consultants that I see on LinkedIn, Twitter or in podcasts.
The S/N ratio is very low in this field. Just pick some documentation from "industry leaders" like Langchain and see that not only is it already and always outdated, it sometimes simply contradicts itself.
In the "blockchain hype" this was similar, so I guess it's a trait of the hype train.
I mean yes, this is what a rapidly expanding field looks like that's probing the boundaries of its problem space. Kind of like following physics in the early to mid 1900s. Different classes of problems have barely been tested against each other, much less fully explored themselves.
In some ways it reminds me of the earlier days of the internet when progress was still very rapid.
It can be hard to know where to start with some of these concepts, especially so given that a lot of recent developments (e.g. RAG) are developing so rapidly that there’s unlikely to be a reference book you could refer to anytime soon that would be current.
That said, I do find that documentation is getting better depending on where you look. The documentation for higher level tools like LlamaIndex is a good starting point for understanding the concepts (not so much in terms of explaining the concepts, but showing where they fit into the overall picture, then you can deep-dive elsewhere on the different parts).
YouTube has always been a mixed bag of very little solid information in a sea of non-experts trying to attract clicks for the latest trends, so it’s not a great starting point IMHO.
As an outsider but avid reader of this stuff linked from HN, I would recommend the channel 3blue1brown. He's got several NN and AI related videos, and the couple I've seen were pretty good.
Of course, everything is, but instead of taking on the task of patching that up, the better approach would be to pretend there will be something that is a lot better than GPT-4 in the near future (because there will be) and design a differentiated product under that premise.
I understand the prompts as a service is short term… but what is a long term product you see?
Why would you need an extra layer here?
This could mean: Instead of diving into langchain and trying to program your way out of a bad model, or trying to do weird prompts, just write a super clear set of instructions and wait for a model that is capable of understanding clear instructions, because that is an obvious goal of everyone working on models right now and they are going to solve this better than your custom workaround can.
This is not a rigid rule, just a matter of proportions. For example, you should probably be willing to try a few weird intermediary prompt hacks, if you want to get going with AI dev right now. But if most of what most people do will probably be solved by a somewhat better model, that's probably a cause for pause.
One wonders, if that's the case, how quickly an AI might improve if it has something close to Google's search site throughput. I mean fielding several billion queries a day, for a year — that would be some pretty stellar training right there I would think.
Yes, you can. Some of the big providers are fairly clear on where in their products this happens, and all offer a way out (mostly when paying for api access)
> One wonders, if that's the case, how quickly an AI might improve if it has something close to Google's search site throughput
Indeed. Another possibility is that user input will turn out to be increasingly less important for upcoming state of the art models.
They do take your feedback and presumably do something with it. Your actual queries are only indirectly useful since they might have private info in them.