Jeremy Howard: evaluation

Transcript context

…All right. I'll give you the key thing. So I've created a new approach. It's not called prompt engineering. It's called dialogue engineering. But I'm creating a system for doing dialogue engineering. It's currently called AI magic. I'm doing most of my work in this system and it's making me much more productive than I was before I used it. So I always just build stuff for myself and hope that it'll be useful for somebody else. Think about chat GPT with code interpreter, right? The basic UX is the same as a 1970s teletype, right? So if you wrote APL on a teletype in the 1970s, you typed onto a thing, your words appeared at the bottom of a sheet of paper and you'd like hit enter and it would scroll up. And then the answer from APL would be printed out, scroll up, and then you would type the next thing. And like, which is also the way, for example, a shell works like bash or ZSH or whatever. It's not terrible, you know, like we all get a lot done in these like very, very basic teletype style REPL environments, but I've never felt like it's optimal and everybody else has just copied chat GPT. So it's also the way BART and Gemini work. It's also the way the Claude web app works. And then you add code interpreter. And the most you can do is to like plead with chat GPT to write the kind of code I want. It's pretty good for very, very, very beginner users who like can't code at all, like by default now the code's even hidden away, so you never even have to see it ever happened. But for somebody who's like wanting to learn to code or who already knows a bit of code or whatever, it's, it seems really not ideal. So okay, that's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum, which is where Sean's work comes in, is, oh, you want to do more than chat GPT? No worries. Here is Visual Studio Code. I run it. There's an empty screen with a flashing cursor. Okay, start coding, you know, and it's like, okay, you can use systems like Sean's or like cursor or whatever to be like, okay, Apple K in cursors, like a creative form that blah, blah, blah. But in the end, it's like a convenience over the top of this incredibly complicated system that full-time sophisticated software engineers have designed over the past few decades in a totally different environment as a way to build software, you know. And so we're trying to like shoehorn in AI into that. And it's not easy to do. And I think there are like much better ways of thinking about the craft of software development in a language model world to be much more interactive, you know. So the thing that I'm building is neither of those things. It's something between the two. And it's built around this idea of crafting a dialogue, you know, where the outcome of the dialogue is the artifacts that you want, whether it be a piece of analysis or whether it be a Python library or whether it be a technical blog post or whatever. gue, you know, where the outcome of the dialogue is the artifacts that you want, whether it be a piece of analysis or whether it be a Python library or whether it be a technical blog post or whatever. So as part of building that, I've created something called Claudette, which is a library for Claude. I've created something called Cosette, which is a library for OpenAI. They're libraries which are designed to make those APIs much more usable, much easier to use, much more concise. And then I've written AI magic on top of those. And that's been an interesting exercise because I did Claudette first, and I was looking at what Simon Willison did with his fantastic LLM library. And his library is designed around like, let's make something that supports all the LLM inference engines and commercial providers. I thought, okay, what if I did something different, which is like make something that's as Claude friendly as possible and forget everything else. So that's what Claudette was. So for example, one of the really nice things in Claude is prefill. So by telling the assistant that this is what your response started with, there's a lot of powerful things you can take advantage of. So yeah, I created Claudette to be as Claude friendly as possible. And then after I did that, and then particularly with GPT 4.0 coming out, I kind of thought, okay, now let's create something that's as OpenAI friendly as possible. And then I tried to look to see, well, where are the similarities and where are the differences? And now can I make them compatible in places where it makes sense for them to be compatible without losing out on the things that make each one special for what they are. So yeah, those are some of the things I've been working on in that space. And I'm thinking we might launch AI magic via a course called how to solve it with code. The name is based on the classic Polya book, if you know how to solve it, which is, you know, one of the classic math books of all time, where we're basically going to try to show people how to solve challenging problems that they didn't think they could solve without doing a full computer science course, by taking advantage of a bit of AI and a bit of like practical skills, as particularly for this like whole generation of people who are learning to code with and because of ChatGPT. Like I love it, I know a lot of people who didn't really know how to code, but they've created things because they use ChatGPT, but they don't really know how to maintain them or fix them or add things to them that ChatGPT can't do, because they don't really know how to code. And so this course will be designed to show you how you can like either become a developer who can like supercharge their capabilities by using language models, or become a language model first developer who can supercharge their capabilities by understanding a bit about process and fundamentals. Nice. That's a great spoiler. You know, I guess the fourth time you're going to be on learning space, we're going to talk about AI magic. Jeremy, before we wrap, this was just a great run through everything. What are the things that when you next come on the podcast in nine, 12 months, we're going to be like, man, Jeremy was like really ahead of it. Like, is there anything that you see in the space that maybe people are not talking enough? You know, what's the next company that's going to fall, like have drama internally, anything in your mind?…

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