Year in Review: 2024
This year included a lot of writing and learning new things.
Posts
Challenges Building an Electron App
I've been building an Electron app called "Delta. Delta is a tool for knowledge exploration and ideation through the branching of conversations with language models. I have lots of ideas for how I want to make this idea useful and valuable, but today it looks like this.
Conversation Branching
Language models are more than chatbots - they're tools for thought. The real value lies in using them as intellectual sounding boards to brainstorm, refine and challenge our ideas.
Models Writing About Coding With Models
I recently found Joe's article, We All Know AI Can’t Code, Right?.
Language model random number generator
I had the idea to try and use a language model as a random number generator. I didn't expect it to actually work as a uniform random number generator but was curious to see what the distribution of numbers would look like.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet Connections Evals
I've continued experimenting with techniques to prompt a language model to solve Connections. At a high level, I set out to design an approach to hold the model to a similar standard as a human player, within the restrictions of the game. These standards and guardrails include the following: The...
VLMs Hallucinate
I've done some experimentation extracting structured data from documents using VLMs. A summary of one approach I've tried can be found in my repo, impulse. I've found using Protobufs to be a relatively effective approach for extracting values from documents. The high-level idea is you write a...
Structured Output, Functions and Prompting
I've been prompting models to output JSON for about as long as I've been using models. Since text-davinci-003, getting valid JSON out of OpenAI's models didn't seem like that big of a challenge, but maybe I wasn't seeing the long tails of misbehavior because I hadn't massively scaled up a use...
VLM data extraction with Protobufs
In light of OpenAI releasing structured output in the model API, let's move output structuring another level up the stack to the microservice/RPC level.
Making Your Vision Real with Models
Using models for various different purposes daily has been a satisfying endeavor for me because they can be used as tools to help make your vision for something come to life. Models are powerful generators that can produce code, writing, images and more based on a user's description of what they...