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Drew Houston: prediction

18 Oct 2024 Latent Space Building the Silicon Brain - with Drew Houston of Dropbox

“Maybe the bigger picture is like, it's super exciting to talk about the LLM and like that piece of the puzzle, but there's this whole other scaffolding of more conventional like retrieval or conventional machine learning, especially because you have to scale up products to like millions of people you do in your toy app is not going to scale to that from a cost or latency or performance standpoint.”

— Drew Houston

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Speaker
Drew Houston
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
18 Oct 2024
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…So do you have any thoughts on rag versus long context, especially, I mean with Dropbox, you know? Sure. Do you just want to shove things in? Like have you seen that be a lot better? Well, they kind of have different strengths and weaknesses, so you need both for different use cases. I mean, it's been awesome in the last 12 months, like now you have these like long context models that can actually do a lot. You can put a book in, you know, Sonnet's context and then now with the later versions of LLAMA, you can have 128k context. So that's sort of the new normal, which is awesome and that, that wasn't even the case a year ago. That said, models don't always use, and certainly like local models don't use the full context well fully yet, and actually if you provide too much irrelevant context, the quality degrades a lot. And so I say in the open source world, like we're still just getting to the cusp of like the full context is usable. And then of course, like when you're something like Dropbox Dash, like it's basically building this whole like brain that's like read everything your company's ever written. And so that's not going to fit into your context window, so you need rag just as a practical reality. And even for a lot of similar reasons, you need like RAM and hard disk in conventional computer architecture. And I think these things will keep like horse trading, like maybe if, you know, a million or 10 million is the new, tokens is the new context length, maybe that shifts. Maybe the bigger picture is like, it's super exciting to talk about the LLM and like that piece of the puzzle, but there's this whole other scaffolding of more conventional like retrieval or conventional machine learning, especially because you have to scale up products to like millions of people you do in your toy app is not going to scale to that from a cost or latency or performance standpoint. So I think you really need these like hybrid architectures that where you have very like purpose fit tools, or you're probably not using Sonnet 3.5 for all of your normal product use cases. You're going to use like a fine tuned 8 billion model or sort of the minimum model that gets you the right output. And then a smaller model also is like a lot more cost and latency versus like much better characteristics on that front. Yeah. Let's jump into the Dropbox AI story. So sure. Your initial prototype was Files GPT. How did it start? And then how did you communicate that internally? You know, I know you have a pretty strong like mammal culture. One where you're like, okay, Hey, we got to really take this seriously.…

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