itsaquicknote

Yeah, wow, a 17M seed round and not a hint of irony. Ferocious. Capital is DESPERATE to throw money into anything that appears to be related to LLMs. "Value creation event of our lifetimes" etc. There's grift money to made here and I'll be damned if some decent proportion of the "API wrapper + template UI" startups masquerading as AI companies aren't cashing in. Not sure I blame them.

The landgrab going on in this space is ferocious. If you weren't convinced this is mania, and a 10M "seed" round for Langchain doesn't do it for you, nothing will. Well done Harrison on the cash grab (take as much money off the table every round as you can), it's a smart move. But I can't shake the feeling that this ever increasing mania will sweep up anything OSS with vague traction and this whole AI space that used to be religiously defaulted to open and sharing will fairly quickly end up in VC-funded fiefdoms with pay-to-play being all that's left modulo the "forever free" community hobbled versions. Hope I'm wrong.

And sometimes it is.

Hey Naveed, this is a great project well done. I'm curious about the summarisation of longform content. You mention that you're using Langchain - are you using the MapReduce approach for documents that exceed the 32k context window, or some other approach? 600 pages at ~500 words/tokens a page would mean about $20 to mapreduce through a big doc, which seems crazy especially if you iterate on those 'summary' prompts. Or are you using embeddings for everything including summary prompts?

This is Searle's Chinese Room posit though right? The argument that there's no abstraction or internal modelling going on. Wish I could find the post I read recently that demonstrated some fairly clear evidence though that there IS some level of internal abstraction/reasoning going on in LLMs.

Do we allow for a matter of degree, rather than a binary, of "zero" vs" "complete" understanding?

Agree to disagree.

Replying to both responses because they're all good points. My argument boils down to the fact that some private companies end up becoming social utilities and once that happens, the rules (should) change as part of the social contract which means, yeah, they can't simply "pull the rug". The research is important precisely because its into systemically significant systems.

I get that it's difficult to define the line where that gets crossed. But the idea to provide a publicly funded trust that manages legacy versions of things like this is not a bad idea.

Research into systemically important infrastructure cannot be damned because that infrastructure isn't public. It's a cheap moralizing argument to say "pfff, this was predictable". Maybe so, but there isn't an alternative. Much like research on Twitter. Once these companies start to drift into providing what become broadscale social utilities and public services it doesn't matter that they're private. There are(/should be) obligations that come with that.

You can't handwave and say go do your research on some micro-niche open source project that's way behind the SOTA and has nowhere near the same reach. That's not what "best practice" means here.

No they're not mate, it's just you. I've read the guidelines (thanks for helpfully linking them). I see this on HN, people infer offense and cite the book rather than engage.

By not highlighting what you found "snarky" your response is a definitional "shallow dismissal". I see you just "picked the most provocative thing to complain about". Not a lot of being "kind" either.

So you know what would also be great? If you held yourself to the standards you're keen to police around here.

Ouch, this nukes a few startups I was watching working on "basically this". What's the plan control.dev and cursor.so?

Can't remember who said it, but it went something like "any headline phrased as a potentially provocative question means the answer is no".

Which is what the paper reduxes to.

Yep. I wanna dial back to being a 0.2 programmer thanks. GPT can fill in the rest. I'll be hanging outside with my kids.

Hah, ChatGPT has successfully poisoned the well. Well done sama.

This lib is great work, a JS interface for running HF models. The comments about how "bad" the outputs are as surprising to me as they are alarming.

OAI has now set the zero-effort bar so high that even HNers (who click on .js headlines) fall into the gap they've left. That sucking sound you hear is market share being hoovered up.

"In the months ahead..."

They've not shipped this. They're planning to. You're reading a marketing piece about work in the pipe. Like so, so many other company product "launches" in this space that are "already testing with a small group of whatevers".

Your corporate memphis girl splash-art is holding a puzzle piece that can clearly never fit. The subtle negative implications of that really sat with me.