Mike Conover

In April 2023 we released an episode named “Mapping the future of *truly* open source models” to talk about Dolly, the first open, commercial LLM. Mike was leading the OSS models team at Databricks at the time. Today, Mike is back on the podcast to give us the “one year later” update on the evolution of large language models and how he’s been using them to build Brightwave, an an AI research assistant for investment professionals. Today they are announcing a $6M seed round (led by Alessio and Decibel!), and sharing some of the learnings from serving customers with >$120B of assets under management in production in the last 4 months since launch. Losing faith in long context windows In our recent “Llama3 1M context window” episode we talked about the amazing progress we have done in context window size, but it’s good to remember that Dolly’s original context size was 1,024 tokens, and this was only 14 months ago. But while understanding length has increased, models are still not able to generate very long answers. His empirical intuition (which matches ours while building smol-podcaster) is that most commercial LLMs, as well as Llama, tend to generate responses most of the time. While Needle in a Haystack tests will pass with flying colors at most context sizes, the granularity of the summary decreases as the context increases as it tries to fit the answer in the same tokens range, rather than returning tokens close to the 4,096 max_output, for example. Recently Rob Mulla from Dreadnode highlighted how LMSys Arena results prefer longer responses by a large margin, so both LLMs and humans have a well documented length bias which doesn’t necessarily track the quality of answer: The way Mike and team solved this is by breaking down the task in multiple subtasks, and then merging them back together. For example, have a book summarized chapter by chapter to preserve more details, and then put those summaries together. In Brightwave’s case, it’s creating multiple subsystems that accomplish different tasks on a large corpus of text separately, and then bringing them all together in a report. For example understanding intent of the question, extracting relations between companies, figuring out if it’s a positive / negative, etc. Mike’s question is whether or not we’ll be able to imbue better synthesis capabilities in the models: can you have synthesis-oriented demonstrations at training time rather than single token prediction? “LLMs as Judges” Strategies In our David Luan episode he mentioned they don’t use any benchmarks for their models, because the benchmarks don’t reflect their customer needs. Brightwave shared some tips on leveraging LLMs as Judges: * Human vs LLM reviews: while they work with human annotators to create high quality datasets, that data isn’t just used to fine tune models but also as a reference basis for future LLM reviews. Having a set of trusted data to use as calibration helps you trust the LLM judgement even more. * Ensemble consistency checking: rather than using an LLM as judge for one output, you use different LLMs to generate a result for the same task, and then use another LLM to highlight where those generations differ. Do the two outputs differ meaningfully? Do they have different beliefs about the implications of something? If there are a lot of discrepancies between generations coming from different models, you then do additional passes to try and resolve them. * Entailment verification: for each unique insight that they generate, they take the output and separately ask LLMs to verify factuality of information based on the original sources. In the actual product, user can then highlight any piece of text and ask it to 1) “Tell Me More” 2) “Show Sources”. Since there’s no way to guarantee factuality of 100% of outputs, and humans have good intuition for things that look out of the ordinary, giving the user access to the review tool helps them build trust in it. It’s all about the data During his time at Databricks, they had created dolly-15k, a dataset of instruction-following records written by thousands of their employees. Since then, no other company has replicated that type of effort even though the data wars are in full effect. It’s been clear in the last year that the half-life of a model is much shorter than the half-life of a dataset. The Pile by Eleuther (see Datasets 101) came out in 2020 and is still widely used; if you had trained an LLM in 2020, you would have definitely replaced it by now as they have gotten better and cheaper. On the age old “RAG v Fine-Tuning” question, Mike shared a great example that we’ll just quote: I think of language models kind of like a stem cell, and then under fine tuning, they differentiate into different kinds of specific cells. I don't think that unbounded agentic behaviors are useful, and that instead, a useful LLM system is more like a finite state machine where the behavior of the system is occupying one of many different behavioral regimes and making decisions about what state should I occupy next in order to satisfy the goal. As you think about the graph of those states that your system is moving through, once you develop conviction that one behavior is useful and repeatable and worthwhile to differentiate down into a specific kind of subsystem, that's where like fine tuning and specifically generating the training data, like having human annotators produce a corpus that is useful enough to get a specific class of behaviors, that's kind of how we use fine tuning rather than trying to imbue net new information into these systems. There are a lot of other nuggets in the episode around knowledge graphs extraction, private vs public data, user intent extraction, etc, but we only have so much room in the writeup so go listen! And if you’re interested in working on these problems, Brightwave is hiring 👀 Watch on YouTube We like Mike. The camera likes Mike. Our audience loooves Mike. Show Notes * Brightwave * Mike Conover * Mike on Latent Space #1 * Nature paper on S&P 500 talent movement * Dolly announcement * Dolly 15K dataset * Bard blog post on double-checking generation * RLHF 201 episode * David Luan Episode * Red Pajama * Snorkel * Renaissance Timestamps * [00:00:00] Introductions * [00:02:40] Social media's polarization influence on LLMs * [00:04:09] What's Brightwave? * [00:05:13] How to hire for a vertical AI startup * [00:09:34] How $20B+ hedge funds use Brightwave * [00:11:23] Evolution of context sizes in language models * [00:14:36] Summarizing vs Ideating with AI * [00:18:26] Collecting feedback in a field with no truth * [00:20:49] Evaluation strategies and the importance of custom datasets * [00:23:43] Should more companies make employees label data? * [00:25:32] Retrieval for highly temporal and hierarchical data * [00:30:05] Context-aware prompting for private vs. public data * [00:32:01] Knowledge graph extraction and structured information retrieval * [00:33:49] Fine-tuning vs RAG * [00:36:16] Anthropomorphizing language models * [00:38:20] Why Brightwave doesn't do spreadsheets * [00:42:24] Will there be fully autonomous hedge funds? * [00:47:58] State of open source AI * [00:53:53] Hiring and team expansion at Brightwave Transcript Alessio [00:00:01]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I have no co-host today. Swyx is in Vienna at ICLR having fun in Europe, and we're in the brand new studio. As you might see, if you're on YouTube, there's still no sound panels on the wall. Mike tried really hard to put them up, but the glue is a little too old for that. So if you hear any echo or anything like that, sorry, but we're doing the best that we can. And today we have our first repeat guest, Mike Conover. Welcome Mike, who's now the founder of Brightwave, not Databricks anymore. Mike [00:00:40]: That's right. Yeah. Pleased to be back. Alessio [00:00:42]: Our last episode was one of the fan favorites, and I think this will be just as good. So for those that have not listened to the first episode, which might be many because the podcast has grown a lot since then, thanks to people like Mike who have interesting conversations on it. You spent a bunch of years doing ML at some of the best companies on the internet, things like Workday, you know, Skipflag, LinkedIn, most recently at Databricks where you were leading the open source large language models team working on Dolly. And now you're doing Brightwave, which is in the financial services space. But this is not something new, I think when you and I first talked about Brightwave, I was like, why is this guy doing a financial services company? And then you look at your background and you were doing papers on The Nature Magazine about LinkedIn data predicting S&P 500 stock movement, like many, many years ago. So what are some of the tying elements in your background that maybe people are overlooking that brought you to do this? Mike [00:01:36]: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So my PhD research was funded by DARPA and we had access to the Twitter data set early in the natural history of the availability of that data set, and it was focused on the large scale structure of propaganda and misinformation campaigns. And LinkedIn, we had planet scale descriptions of the structure of the global economy. And so primarily my work was homepage news feed relevant. So when you go to LinkedIn.com, you'd see updates from one of our machine learning models. But additionally, I was a research liaison as part of the economic graph challenge and had this Nature Communications paper where we demonstrated that 500 million jobs transitions can be hierarchically clustered as a network of labor flows and could predict next quarter S&P 500 market gap changes. And at Workday, I was director of financials machine learning. You start to see how organizations are organisms. And I think of the way that like an accountant or the market encodes information in databases similar to how social insects, for example, organize their work and make collective decisions about where to allocate resources or time and attention. And that especially with the work on Twitter, we would see network structures relating to polarization emerge organically out of the interactions of many individual components. And so like much of my professional work has been focused on this idea that our lives are governed by systems that we're unable to see from our locally constrained perspective. And when humans interact with technology, they create digital trace data that allows us to observe the structure of those systems as though through a microscope or a telescope. And particularly as regards finance, I think the markets are the ultimate manifestation and record of that collective decision making process that humans engage in. Alessio [00:03:21]: Just to start going off script right away, how do you think about some of these interactions creating the polarization and how that reflects in the language models today because they're trained on this data? Like do you think the models pick up on these things on their own as well? Mike [00:03:34]: Absolutely. Yeah. I think they are a compression of the world as it existed at the point in time when they were pre-trained. And so I think absolutely. And you see this in Word2Vec too. I mean, just the semantics of how we think about gender as it relates to professions are encoded in the structure of these models and like language models, I think are much more sort of complete representation of human sort of beliefs. Alessio [00:04:01]: So we left you at Databricks last time you were building Dolly. Tell us a bit more about Brightwave. This is the first time you're really talking about it publicly. Mike [00:04:09]: Yeah. Yeah. And it's a pleasure. So Brightwave is a $6 million seed round, led by Decibel, that we love working with, and including participation from Point72, one of the largest hedge funds in the world and Moonfire Ventures. And if you think of the job of an active asset manager, the work to be done is to understand something about the market that nobody else has seen in order to identify a mispriced asset. And it's our view that that is not a task that is well suited to human intellect or attention span. And so much as I was gesturing towards the ability of these models to perceive more than a human is able to, we think that there's a historically unique opportunity to expand individual's ability to reason about the structure of the economy and the markets. It's not clear that you get superhuman reasoning capabilities from human level demonstrations of skill. And by that I mean the pre-training corpus, but then additionally the fine tuning corpuses. I think you largely mimic the demonstrations that are present at model training time. But from a working memory standpoint, these models outclass humans in their ability to reason about these systems. Alessio [00:05:13]: And you started Brightwave with Brandon. What's the story? You two worked together at Workday, but he also has a really relevant background. Mike [00:05:20]: Yes. So Brandon Kotara is my co-founder, the CTO, and he's a very special human. So he has a deep background in finance. He was the former CTO of a federally regulated derivatives exchange, but his first deep learning patent was filed in 2018. And so he spans worlds. He has experience building mission critical infrastructure in highly regulated environments for finance use cases, but also was very early to the deep learning party and understand. He led at Workday, was the tech lead for semantic search over hundreds of millions of resumes and job listings. And so just has been working with information retrieval and neural information retrieval methods for a very long time. And so was an exceptional person, and I'm glad to count him among the people that we're doing this with. Alessio [00:06:07]: Yeah. And a great fisherman. Mike [00:06:09]: Yeah. Very talented. Alessio [00:06:11]: That's always important. Mike [00:06:12]: Very enthusiastic. Alessio [00:06:13]: And then you have a bunch of amazing engineers, then you have folks like JP who used to work at Goldman Sachs. Yeah. How should people think about team building in this more vertical domain? Obviously you come from a deep ML background, but you also need some of the industry side. What's the right balance? Mike [00:06:28]: I think one of the things that's interesting about building verticalized solutions in AI in 2024 is that historically, you need the AI capability, you need to understand both how the models behave and then how to get them to interact with other kinds of machine learning subsystems that together perform the work of a system that can reason on behalf of a human. There are also material systems engineering problems in there. So I saw, I forget who this is attributed to, but a tweet that made reference to all of the traditional software companies are trying to hire AI talent and all the AI companies are trying to hire systems engineers, and that is 100% the case. Getting these systems to behave in a predictable and repeatable and observable way is equally challenging to a lot of the methodological challenges. But then you bring in, whether it's law or medicine or public policy or in our case finance, I think a lot of the most valuable, like Grammarly is a good example of a company that has generative work product that is valuable by most humans. Whereas in finance, the character of the insight, the depth of insight and the non-consensusness of the insight really requires fairly deep domain expertise. And even operating an exchange, I mean, when we went to raise it around, a lot of people said, why don't you start a hedge fund? And it's like, there are many, many separate skills that are unrelated to AI in that problem. And so we've brought into the fold domain experts in finance who can help us evaluate the character and sort of steer the system. Alessio [00:07:59]: So that's the team. What does the system actually do? What's the Brightwave product? Mike [00:08:03]: Yeah. I mean, it does many, many things, but it acts as a partner in thought to finance professionals. So you can ask Brightwave a question like, how is NVIDIA's position in the GPU market impacted by rare earth metal shortages? And it will identify as thematic contributors to an investment decision or developing your thesis that in response to export controls on A100 cards, China has put in place licensors on the transfer of germanium and gallium, which are not rare earth metals, but they're semiconductor production inputs and has expanded its control of African and South American mining operations. And so we see, if you think about, we have a $20 billion crossover hedge fund. Their equities team uses this tool to go deep on a thesis. So I was describing this like multiple steps into the value chain or supply chain for companies. We see wealth management professionals using Brightwave to get up to speed extremely quickly as they step into nine conversations tomorrow with clients who are assessing like, do you know something that I don't? Can I trust you to be a steward of my financial wellbeing? We see investor relations teams using Brightwave. You just think about the universe of coverage that a person working in finance needs to be aware of, the ability to rip through filings and transcripts and have a very comprehensive view of the market. It's extremely rate limited by how quickly a person is able to read and not just read, but like solve the blank page problem of knowing what to say about a factor of finding. Alessio [00:09:34]: So you mentioned the $20 billion hedge fund. What's like the range of customers that you work with as far as AUM goes? Mike [00:09:41]: I mean, we have customers across the spectrum. So from $500 million owner operated RIAs to organizations with tens and tens of billions of dollars in asset center management. Alessio [00:09:52]: What else can you share about customers that you're working with? Mike [00:09:55]: Yeah. So we have seen traction that far exceeded our expectations from the market. You sit somebody down with a system that can take any question and generate tight, actionable financial analysis on that subject and the product kind of sells itself. So we see many, many different funds, firms, and strategies that are making use of Brightwave. So you've got 10 person owner operated registered investment advisor, the classical wealth manager, you know, $500 million in AUM. We have crossover hedge funds that have tens and tens of billions of dollars in assets center management, very different use case. So that's more investment research, whereas the wealth managers can use this to step into client interactions, just exceptionally well prepared. We see investor relations teams. We see corporate strategy types that are needing to understand very quickly new markets, new themes, and just the ability to very quickly develop a view on any investment theme or sort of strategic consideration is broadly applicable to many, many different kinds of personas. Alessio [00:10:56]: Yeah. I can attest to the product selling itself, given that I'm a user. Let's jump into some of the technical challenges and work behind it, because there are a lot of things. As I mentioned, you were on the podcast about a year ago. Yep. You had released Dolly from Databricks, which was one of the first open source LLMs. Yep. Dolly had a whopping 1,024 tokens of context size. And today, you know, I think a thousand tokens, a model would be unusable. Mike [00:11:23]: You lose that much out. Alessio [00:11:24]: Yeah, exactly. How did you think about the evolution of context sizes as you built the company and where we are today? What are things that people get wrong? Any commentary there? Mike [00:11:34]: Sure. We very much take a systems of systems approach. When I started the company, I think I had more faith in the ability of large context windows to generally solve problems relating to synthesis. And actually, if you think about the attention mechanism and the way that it computes similarities between tokens at a distance, I, on some level, believed that as you would scale that up, you would have the ability to simultaneously perceive and draw conclusions across vast, disparate bodies of content. And I think that does not empirically seem to be the case. So when, for example, you, and this is something anybody can try, take a very long document, like needle in a haystack. I think, sure, we can do information retrieval on specific fact-finding activities pretty easily. I kind of think about it like summarizing, if you write a book report on an entire book versus a synopsis of each individual chapter, there is a characteristic output length for these models. Let's say it's about 1,200 tokens. It is very difficult to get any of the commercial LLMs or LLAMA to write 5,000 tokens. And you think about it as, what is the conditional probability that I generate an end token? It just gets higher the more tokens are in the context window prior to that sort of next inference step. And so if I have 1,000 words in which to say something, the level of specificity and the level of depth when I am assessing a very large body of content is going to necessarily be less than if I am saying something specific about a sub-passage. I mean, if you think about drawing a parallel to consumer internet companies like LinkedIn or Facebook, there are many different subsystems with it. So let's take the Facebook example. Facebook almost certainly has, I mean, you can see this in your profile, your inferred interests. What are the things that it believes that you care about? Those assessments almost certainly feed into the feed relevance algorithms that would judge what you are, you know, am I going to show you snowboarding content? I'm going to show you aviation content. It's the outputs of one machine learning system feeding into another machine learning system. And I think with modern rag and sort of agent-based reasoning, it is really about creating subsystems that do specific tasks well. And I think the problem of deciding how to decompose large documents into more kind of atomic reasoning units is still very important. Now, it's an open question whether that is a model that is addressable by pre-training or instruction tuning. Like, can you have synthesis-oriented demonstrations at training time? And now this problem is more robustly solved because synthesis is quite different from complete the next word in the great Gatsby. I think empirically is not the case that you can just throw all of the SCC filings in a million token context window and get deep insight that is useful out the other end. Alessio [00:14:36]: Yeah. And I think that's the main difference about what you're doing. It's not about summarizing. It's about coming up with different ideas and kind of like thought threads to pull on. Mike [00:14:47]: Yeah. You know, if I think that GLP-1s are going to blow up the diet industry, identifying and putting in context a negative result from a human clinical trial, or for example, that adherence rates to Ozempic after a year are just 35%, what are the implications of this? So there's an information retrieval component. And then there's a not just presenting me with a summary of like, here's here are the facts, but like, what does this entail? And how does this fit into my worldview, my fund strategy? Broadly, I think that, you know, I mean, this idea, I think, is very eloquently puts it, which is, and this is not my insight, but that language models, and help me know who said this. You may be familiar, but language models are not tools for creating new knowledge. They're tools for helping me create new knowledge. Like they themselves do not do that. I think that that's presently the right way to think about it. Alessio [00:15:36]: Yeah. I've read a tweet about Needle in the Haystack actually being harmful to some of this work because now the model is like too focused on recalling everything versus saying, oh, that doesn't matter. Like ignoring some of the things, if you think about a S1 filing, like 85% is like boilerplate. It's like, you know, previous performance doesn't guarantee future performance. Like the company might not be able to turn a profit in the future, blah, blah, blah. All these things, they always come up again. Mike [00:16:02]: COVID and currency fluctuations. Alessio [00:16:03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yada, yada, yada. We have a large workforce and all of that. Have you had to do any work at the model level to kind of like make it okay to forget these things? Or like have you found that making it a smaller problem than putting them back together kind of solves for that? Mike [00:16:19]: Absolutely. And I think this is where having domain expertise around the structure of these documents. So if you look at the different chunking strategies that you can employ to understand like what is the intent of this clause or phrase, and then really be selective at retrieval time in order to get the information that is most relevant to a user query based on the semantics of that unique document. And I think it's certainly not just a sliding window over that corpus. Alessio [00:16:45]: And then the flip side of it is obviously factuality. You don't want to forget things that were there. How do you tackle that? Mike [00:16:52]: Yeah, I mean, of course, it's a very deep problem. And I think I'll be a little circumspect about the specific kinds of methods we use. This sort of multiple passes over the material and saying, how convicted are you that what you're saying is in fact true? And you can take generations from multiple different models and compare and contrast and say, do these both reach the same conclusion? You can treat it like a voting problem. We train our own models to assess. You can think of this like entailment. Is this supported by the underlying primary sources? And I think that you have methodological approaches to this problem, but then you also have product affordances. There was a great blog post on Bard from the Bard team. It was sort of a design-led product innovation that allows you to ask the model to double-check the work. So if you have a surprising finding, we can let the user discretionarily spend more compute to double-check the work. And I think that you want to build product experiences that are fault tolerant. And the difference between hallucination and creativity is fuzzy. Do you ever get language models with Next Token Prediction as the loss function that are guaranteed to not contain factual misstatements? That is not clear. Now, maybe being able to invoke Code Interpreter, like code generation and then execution in a secure way, helps to solve some of these problems, especially for quantitative reasoning. That may be the case, but for right now, I think you need to have product affordances that allow you to live with the reality that these things are fallible. Alessio [00:18:26]: We did our RLHF 201 episode, just talking about different methods and whatnot. How do you think about something like this, where it's maybe unclear in the short term, even if the product is right? It might give an insight that might be right, but it might not prove until later. So it's kind of hard for the users to say, that's wrong, because actually it might be like, you think it's wrong. Like an investment, that's kind of what it comes down to. Some people are wrong. Some people are right. How do you think about some of the product features that you need and something like this to bring user feedback into the mix and maybe how you approach it today and how you think about it long term? Mike [00:19:01]: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that your point about the model may make a statement which is not actually verifiable. It's like, this may be the case. I think that is where the reason we think of this as a partner in thought, is that humans are always going to have access to information that has not been digitized. And so in finance, you see that, especially with regards to expert call networks, the unstated investment theses that a portfolio manager may have, like, we just don't do biotech. Or we think that Eli Lilly is actually very exposed because of how unpleasant it is to take examples. Right. Those are things that are beliefs about the world, but that may not be like falsifiable right now. And so I think you can, again, take pages from the consumer web playbook and think about personalization. So it is getting a person to articulate everything that they believe is not a realistic task. Netflix doesn't ask you to describe what kinds of movies you like and they give you the option to vote, but nobody does this. And so what I think you do is you observe people's revealed preferences. So one of the capabilities that our system exposes is, given everything that Brightwave has read and assessed, and like the sort of synthesized financial analysis, what are the natural next questions that a person investigating this subject should ask? And you can think of this chain of thought and this deepening kind of investigative process and the direction in which the user steers the attention of this system reveals information about what do they care about, what do they believe, what kinds of things are important. And so at the individual level, but then also at the fund and firm level, you can develop like an implicit representation of your beliefs about the world in a way that you just you're never going to get somebody to write everything down. Alessio [00:20:49]: How does that tie into one of our other favorite topics, e-mails? We had David Luan from Adapt and he mentioned they don't care about benchmarks because their customers don't work on benchmarks, they work on business results. How do you think about that for you? And maybe as you build a new company, when is the time to like still focus on the benchmark versus when it's time to like move on to your own evaluation using maybe labelers or whatnot? Mike [00:21:14]: We use a fair bit of LLM supervision to evaluate multiple different subsystems. And I think that one of the reasons that we pay human annotators to evaluate the quality of the generative outputs, and I think that that is always the reference standard, but we frequently first turn to LLM supervision as a way to have, whether it's at fine-tuning time or even for subsystems that are not generative, what is the quality of the system? I think we will generate a small corpus of high-quality domain expert annotations and always compare that against how well is either LLM supervision or even just a heuristic. A simple thing you can do, this is a technique that we do not use, but as an example, do not generate any integers or any numbers that are not present in the underlying source data. If they're doing rag, you can just say you can't name numbers that are not, it's very sort of heavy-handed, but you can take the annotations of a human evaluator and then compare that. I mean, Snorkel kind of takes a similar perspective, like multiple different weak sort of supervision data sets can give you substantially more than any one of them does on their own. And so I think you want to compare the quality of any evaluation against human-generated sort of benchmark. But at the end of the day, especially for things that are nuanced, is this transcendent poetry, there's just no way to multiple choice your way out of that, you know? And so really where I think a lot of the flywheels for some of the large LLM companies are, it's methodological, obviously, but it's also just data generation. And you think about like, you know, for anybody who's done crowdsource work, and this I think applies to the high-skilled human annotators as well, like you look at the Google search quality evaluator guidelines, it's like a 90 or 120-page rubric describing like, what is a high-quality Google search result? And it's like very difficult to get on a human level people to reproducibly follow a rubric. And so what is your process for orchestrating that motion? Like how do you articulate what is high-quality insight? I think that's where a lot of the work actually happens, and that it's sort of the last resort. Ideally, you want to automate everything, but ultimately the most interesting problems right now are those that are not especially automatable. Alessio [00:23:43]: One thing you did at Databricks was the, well, not that you did specifically, but the team there was like the Dolly 15K dataset. You mentioned people misvalue the value of this data. Why has no other company done anything similar with like creating this employee-led dataset? You can imagine some of these Goldman Sachs, they got like thousands and thousands of people in there. Obviously they have different privacy and whatnot requirements. Do you think more companies should do it? Do you think there's like a misunderstanding of how valuable that is? Mike [00:24:15]: So I think Databricks is a very special company and led by people who are very sort of courageous, I guess is one word for it. Just like, let's just ship it. And I think it's unusual. And it's also because I think most companies will recognize, like if they go to the effort to produce something like that, they recognize that it is competitive advantage to have it and to be the only company that has it. And I think Databricks is in an unusual position in that they benefit from more people having access to these kinds of sources, but you also saw scale, I guess they haven't released it. Alessio [00:24:49]: Well, yeah. I'm sure they have it because they charge people a lot of money. Mike [00:24:51]: They created that alternative to GSM 8K, I believe was how that's said. I guess they too are not releasing that. Alessio [00:25:01]: It's interesting because I talked to a lot of enterprises and a lot of them are like, man, I spent so much money on Scale. And I'm like, why don't you just do it? And they're like, what? Mike [00:25:11]: So I think this again gets to the human process orchestration. It's one thing to do like a single monolithic push to create a training data set like that or an evaluation corpus. But I think it's another to have a repeatable process. And a lot of that realistically is pretty unsexy, like people management work. So that's probably a big part of it. Alessio [00:25:32]: So we have these four wars of AI framework, the data quality war, we kind of touched on a little bit now. About RAG, that's like the other battlefield, RAG and context sizes and kind of like all these different things. You work in a space that has a couple of different things. One, temporality of data is important because every quarter there's new data and like the new data usually overrides the previous one. So you cannot just like do semantic search and hope that you get the latest one. And then you have obviously very structured numbers thing that are very important to the token level. Like, you know, 50% gross margins and 30% gross margins are very different, but you know, this organization is not that different. Any thoughts on like how to build a system to handle all of that as much as you can share, of course? Mike [00:26:19]: Yeah, absolutely. So I think this again, rather than having open ended retrieval, open ended reasoning, our approach is to decompose the problem into multiple different subsystems that have specific goals. And so, I mean, temporality is a great example. When you think about time, I mean, just look at all of the libraries for managing calendars. Time is kind of at the intersection of language and math. And this is one of the places where, without taking specific technical measures to ensure that you get high quality narrative overlays of statistics that are changing over time and have a description of how a PE multiple is increasing or decreasing, and like a retrieval system that is aware of the time, sort of the time intent of the user query, right? So if I'm asking something about breaking news, that's going to be very different than if I'm looking for a thematic account of the past 18 months in Fed interest rate policy. You have to have retrieval systems that are, to your point, like if I just look for something that is a nearest neighbor without any of that temporal or other qualitative metadata overlay, you're just going to get a kind of a bag of facts. I think that that is explicitly not helpful, because the worst failure state for these systems is that they are wrong in a convincing way. And so I think, at least presently, you have to have subsystems that are aware of the semantics of the documents, or aware of the semantics of the intent behind the question, and then have multiple, we have multiple evaluation steps. Once you have the generated outputs, we assess it multiple different ways to know, is this a factual statement given the sort of content that's been retrieved? Alessio [00:28:10]: Yep. And what about, I think people think of financial services, they think of privacy, confidentiality. What's kind of like customer's interest in that, as far as like sharing documents and like, how much of a deal breaker is that if you don't have them? I don't know if you want to share any about that and how you think about architecting the product. Mike [00:28:29]: Yeah, so one of the things that gives our customers a high degree of confidence is the fact that Brandon operated a federally regulated derivatives exchange. That experience in these highly regulated environments, I mean, additionally, at Workday, I worked with the financials product, and without going into specifics, it's exceptionally sensitive data, and you have multiple tenants, and it's just important that you take the right approach to being a steward of that material. And so, from the start, we've built in a way that anticipates the need for controls on how that data is managed, and who has access to it, and how it is treated throughout the lifecycle. And so that, for our customer base, where frequently the most interesting and alpha-generating material is not publicly available, has given them a great degree of confidence in sharing. Some of this, the most sensitive and interesting material, with systems that are able to combine it with content that is either publicly or semi-publicly available, to create non-consensus insight into some of the most interesting and challenging problems in finance. Alessio [00:29:40]: Yeah, we always say it breaks our recommendation systems for LLMs. How do you think about that when you have private versus public data, where sometimes you have public data as one thing, but then the private is like, well, actually, we got this insight model, with this insight scoop that we're going to figure out. How do you think in the RAC system about a value of these different documents? I know a lot of it is secret sauce, but- No, no, it's fine. Mike [00:30:05]: I mean, I think that there is, so I will gesture towards this by way of saying context-aware prompting. So you can have prompts that are composable, and that have different command units that may or may not be present based on the semantics of the content that is being populated into the RAG context window. And so that's something we make great use of, which is, where is this being retrieved from? What does it represent? And what should be in the instruction set in order to treat and respect the underlying contents, not just as like, here's a bunch of text, you figure it out, but this is important in the following way, or this aspect of the SEC filings are just categorically uninteresting, or this is sell-side analysis from a favored source. And so it's that creating it, much like you have with the qualitative, the problem of organizing the work of humans, you have the problem of organizing the work of all of these different AI subsystems, and getting them to propagate what they know through the rest of the stack, so that if you have multiple seven, 10 sequence inference calls, that all of the relevant metadata is propagated through that system, and that you are aware of, where did this come from? How convicted am I that it is a source that should be trusted? I mean, you see this also just in analysis, right? So different, like Seeking Alpha is a good example of just a lot of people with opinions, and some of them are great, some of them are really mid, and how do you build a system that is aware of the user's preferences for different sources? I think this is all related to how, we talked about systems engineering, it's all related to how you actually build the systems. Alessio [00:31:51]: And then, just to kind of wrap on the rec side, how should people think about knowledge graphs and kind of like extraction from documents, versus just like semantic search over the documents? Mike [00:32:01]: Knowledge graph extraction is an area where we're making a pretty substantial investment, and so I think that it is underappreciated how powerful, there's the generative capabilities of language models, but there's also the ability to program them to function as arbitrary machine learning systems, basically for marginally zero cost. And so, the ability to extract structured information from huge, sort of unfathomably large bodies of content in a way that is single pass, so rather than having to reanalyze a document every time that you perform inference or respond to a user query, we believe quite firmly that you can also, in an additive way, perform single pass extraction over this body of text and then bring that into the RAG context window. And this really sort of levers off of my experience at LinkedIn, where you had this structured graph representation of the global economy, where you said, person A works at company B, we believe that there's an opportunity to create a knowledge graph that has resolution that greatly exceeds what any, whether it's Bloomberg or LinkedIn, currently has access to, where we're getting as granular as person X submitted congressional testimony that was critical of organization Y, and this is the language that is attached to that testimony, and then you have a structured data artifact that you can pivot through and reason over that is complementary to the generative capabilities that language models expose. And so it's the same technology being applied to multiple different ends. And this is manifest in the product surface, where it's a highly facetable, pivotable product, but it also enhances the reasoning capability of the system. Alessio [00:33:49]: Yeah, you know, when you mentioned you don't wanna re-query like the same thing over and over, a lot of people may say, well, I'll just fine tune this information in the model, you know? How do you think about that? That was one thing when we started working together, you were like, we're not building foundation models. A lot of other startups were like, oh, we're building the finance financial model, the finance foundation model, or whatever. When is the right time for people to do fine tuning versus RAG? Any heuristics that you can share that you use to think about it? Mike [00:34:19]: So we, in general, I do not, I'll just say like, I don't have a strong opinion about how much information you can imbue into a model that is not present in pre-training through large-scale fine tuning. The benefit of rag is the capability around grounded reasoning. So the, you know, forcing it to attend to a collection of facts that are known and available at inference time, and sort of like materially, like only using these facts. At least in my view, the role of fine tuning is really more around, I think of like language models kind of like a stem cell, and then under fine tuning, they differentiate into different kinds of specific cells, so kidney or an eye cell. And if you think about specifically, like, I don't think that unbounded agentic behaviors are useful, and that instead, a useful LLM system is more like a finite state machine where the behavior of the system is occupying one of many different behavioral regimes and making decisions about what state should I occupy next in order to satisfy the goal. As you think about the graph of those states that your system is moving through, once you develop conviction that one behavior is useful and repeatable and worthwhile to differentiate down into a specific kind of subsystem, that's where like fine tuning and like specifically generating the training data, like having human annotators produce a corpus that is useful enough to get a specific class of behaviors, that's kind of how we use fine tuning rather than trying to imbue net new information into these systems. Alessio [00:36:00]: Yeah, and people always try to turn LLMs into humans. It's like, oh, this is my reviewer, this is my editor. I know you're not in that camp. So any thoughts you have on how people should think about, yeah, how to refer to models? Mike [00:36:16]: I mean, we've talked a little bit about this, and it's notable that I think there's a lot of anthropomorphizing going on, and that it reflects the difficulty of evaluating the systems. Is it like, does the saying that you're the journal editor for Nature, does that help? Like you've got the editor, and then you've got the reviewer and you've got the, you're the private investigator. It's like, this is, I think, literally we wave our hands and we say, maybe if I tell you that I'm gonna tip you, that's gonna help. And it sort of seems to, and like maybe it's just like the more cycles, the more compute that is attached to the prompt and then the sort of like chain of thought at inference time, it's like, maybe that's all that we're really doing and that it's kind of like hidden compute. But our experience has been that you can get really, really high quality reasoning from roughly an agentic system without needing to be too cute about it. You can describe the task and within well-defined bounds, you don't need to treat the LLM like a person in order to get it to generate high quality outputs. Alessio [00:37:24]: And the other thing is like all these agent frameworks are assuming everything is an LLM. Mike [00:37:29]: Yeah, for sure. And I think this is one of the places where traditional machine learning has a real material role to play in producing a system that hangs together. And there are guaranteeable like statistical promises that classical machine learning systems to include traditional deep learning can make about what is the set of outputs and like what is the characteristic distribution of those outputs that LLMs cannot afford. And so like one of the things that we do is we, as a philosophy, try to choose the right tool for the job. And so sometimes that is a de novo model that has nothing to do with LLMs that does one thing exceptionally well. And whether that's retrieval or critique or multiclass classification, I think having many, many different tools in your toolbox is always valuable. Alessio [00:38:20]: This is great. So there's kind of the missing piece that maybe people are wondering about. You do a financial services company and you didn't do anything in Excel. What's the story behind why you're doing partner in thought versus, hey, this is like a AI enabled model that understands any stock and all that? Mike [00:38:37]: Yeah, and to be clear, Brightwave does a fair amount of quantitative reasoning. I think what is an explicit non-goal for the company is to create Excel spreadsheets. And I think when you look at products that work in that way, you can spend hours with an Excel spreadsheet and not notice a subtle bug. And that is a highly non-fault tolerant product experience where you encounter a misstatement in a financial model in terms of how a formula is composed and all of your assumptions are suddenly violated. And now it's effectively wasted effort. So as opposed to the partner in thought modality, which is yes and, like if the model says something that you don't agree with, you can say, take it under consideration. This is not interesting to me. I'm going to pivot to the next finding or claim. And it's more like a dialogue. The other piece of this is that the financial modeling is often very, when we talk to our users, it's very personal. So they have a specific view of how a company is structured. They have the one key driver of asset performance that they think is really, really important. It's kind of like the difference between writing an essay and having an essay, I guess. Like the purpose of homework is to actually develop what do I think about this? And so it's not clear to me that like push a button, have a financial model is solving the actual problem that the financial model affords. That said, we take great efforts to have exceptionally high quality quantitative reasoning. So we think about, and I won't get into too many specifics about this, but we deal with a fair number of documents that have tabular data that is really important to making informed decisions. And so the way that our RAG systems operate over and retrieve from tabular data sources is it's something that we place a great degree of emphasis on it's just, I think the medium of Excel spreadsheets is just, I think not the right play for this class of technologies as they exist in 2024. Alessio [00:40:40]: Yeah, what about 2034? Mike [00:40:42]: 2034? Alessio [00:40:43]: Are people still going to be making Excel models or like, yeah, I think to me, the most interesting thing is like, how are the models abstracting people away from some of these more syntax driven thing and making them focus on what matters to them? Mike [00:40:58]: Yeah, I wouldn't be able to tell you what the future, 10 years from now it looks like. I think anybody who could convince you of that is not necessarily somebody to be trusted. I do think that, so let's draw the parallel to accountants in the 70s. So VisiCalc, I believe came out in 1979. And historically the core, you know, you would have as an accountant, as a finance professional in the 70s, like I'm the one who runs the, I run the numbers. I do the arithmetic and that's like my main job. And we think that, I mean, you just look now that's not a job anybody wants. And the sophistication of the analysis that a person is able to perform as a function of having access to powerful tools like computational spreadsheets is just much greater. And so I think that with regards to language models, it is probably the case that there is a play in the workflow where it is commenting on your analysis within that, you know, spreadsheet based context, or it is taking information from those models and sucking this into a system that does qualitative reasoning on top of that. But I think the, it is an open question as to whether the actual production of those models is still a human task. But I think the sophistication of the analysis that is available to us and the completeness of that analysis necessarily increases over time. Alessio [00:42:24]: What about AI hedge funds? Obviously, I mean, we have quants today, right? But those are more kind of like momentum driven, kind of like signal driven and less about long thesis driven. Do you think that's a possibility? Mike [00:42:35]: It's, this is an interesting question. I would put it back to you and say like, how different is that from what hedge funds do now? I think there is, the more that I have learned about how teams at hedge funds actually behave, and you look at like systematics desks or semi-systematic trading groups, man, it's a lot like a big machine learning team. And it's, I sort of think it's interesting, right? So like, if you look at video games and traditional like Bay Area tech, there's not a ton of like talent mobility between those two communities. You have people that work in video games and people that work in like SaaS software. And it's not that like cognitively they would not be able to work together. It's just like a different set of skill sets, a different set of relationships. And it's kind of like network clusters that don't interact. I think there's probably a similar phenomenon happening with regards to machine learning within the active asset allocation community. And so like, it's actually not clear to me that we don't have AI hedge funds now. The question of whether you have an AI that is operating a trading desk, that seems a little, maybe, like I don't have line of sight to something like that existing yet. No, I mean, I'm always curious. Alessio [00:43:48]: I think about asset management on a few different ways, but venture capital is like extremely power law driven. It's really hard to do machine learning in power law businesses because, you know, the distribution of outcomes is like so small versus public equities. Most high-frequency trading is like very, you know, bell curve, normal distribution. It's like, even if you just get 50.5% at the right scale, you're gonna make a lot of money. And I think AI starts there, right? And today, most high-frequency trading is already AI driven. You know, Renaissance started a long time ago using these models. But I'm curious how it's gonna move closer and closer to like power law businesses, right? I would say some boutique hedge funds, their pitch is like, hey, we're differentiated because we only do kind of like these long-only strategies that are like thesis driven versus, you know, movement driven. And most venture capitalists will tell you, well, our fund is different because we have this unique thesis on this market. And I think like five years ago, I've read this blog post about why machine learning would never work in venture because the things that you're investing in today, they're just like no precedent that should tell you this will work. You know, most new companies, a model will tell you this is not gonna work, you know, versus the closer you get to the public companies, the more any innovation is like, okay, this is kind of like this thing that happened. And I feel like these models are quite good at generalizing and thinking, again, going back to the partnering thought, like thinking about second order. Mike [00:45:13]: Yeah, and that's maybe where concrete example, I think it certainly is the case that we tell retrospective, to your point about venture, we tell retrospective stories where it's like, well, here was the set of observable facts. This was knowable at the time, and these people made the right call and were able to cross correlate all of these different sources and said, this is the bet we're gonna make. I think that process of idea generation is absolutely automatable. And the question of like, do you ever get somebody who just sets the system running and it's making all of its own decisions like that, and it is truly like doing thematic investing or more of the like what a human analyst would be kind of on the hook for, as opposed to like HFT. But the ability of models to say, here is a fact pattern that is noteworthy, and we should pay more attention here. Because if you think about the matrix of like all possible relationships in the economy, it grows with the square of the number of facts you're evaluating, like polynomial with the number of facts you're evaluating. And so if I want to make bets on AI, I think it's like, what are ways to profit from the rise of AI? It is very straightforward to take a model and say, parse through all of these documents and find second order derivative bets and say, oh, it turns out that energy is like very, very adjacent to investments in AI and may not be priced in the same way that GPUs are. And a derivative of energy, for example, is long duration energy storage. And so you need a bridge between renewables, which have fluctuating demands, and the compute requirements of these data centers. And I think, and I'm telling this story as like, having witnessed Brightwave do this work, you can take a premise and say like, what are second and third order bets that we can make on this topic? And it's going to come back with, here's a set of reasonable theses. And then I think a human's role in that world is to assess like, does this make sense given our fund strategy? Does this, is this coherent with the calls that I've had with the management teams? There's this broad body of knowledge that I think humans sort of are the ultimate like, synthesizers and deciders. And like, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the world of the future looks like, and the AI that truly does everything, I think it is kind of a singularity vector where it's like really hard to reason about like, what that world looks like. And like, you asked me to speculate, but I'm actually kind of hesitant to do so because it's just the forecast, the hurricane path just diverges far too much to have a real conviction about what that looks like. Alessio [00:47:58]: Awesome, I know we've already taken up a lot of your time, but maybe one thing to touch on before wrapping is open source LLMs. Obviously you were at the forefront of it. We recorded our episode the day that Red Pajama was open source and we were like, oh man, this is mind blowing. This is going to be crazy. And now we're going to have an open source dense transformer model that is 400 billion parameters. I don't know if one year ago you could have told me that that was going to happen. So what do you think matters in open source? What do you think people should work on? What are like things that people should keep in mind to evaluate? Okay, is this model actually going to be good? Or is it just like cheating some benchmarks to look good? It's like, is there anything there? Like, yeah, this is the part of the podcast where people already dropped off if they wanted to. So they want to hear the hot things right now. Mike [00:48:46]: I mean, I do think that that's another reason to have your own private evaluation corpuses is so that you can objectively and out of sample measure the performance of these models. And again, sometimes that just looks like giving everybody on the team 250 annotations and saying, we're just going to grind through this. And you have to tell, does this meet? The other thing about doing the work yourself is that you get to articulate your loss function precisely. What is the thing that, what do I actually want the system to behave like? Do I prefer this system or this model or this other model? Yeah, and I think the work around overfitting on the test I think is like that 100% is happening. One notable, in contrast to a year ago, say, the incentives, the economic incentives for companies to train their own foundation models, I think are diminishing. So the window in which you are the dominant pre-train, and let's say that you spend five to $40 million for like a, call it kind of a commodity-ish pre-train, not 400 billion would be another sort of- Alessio [00:49:50]: It costs more than 40 million. Another leap. Mike [00:49:52]: But the kind of thing that, like a small multi-billion dollar mom and pop shop might be able to pull off. The benefit that you get from that is like, I think, diminishing over time. And so I think fewer companies are going to make that capital outlay. And I think that there's probably some material negatives to that. But the other piece is that we're seeing that, at least in the past two and a half, three months, there's a convergence towards like, well, these models all behave fairly similarly. And it's probably that the training data on which they are pre-trained is substantially overlapping. And so it's generalizing a model that generalizes to that training data. And so it's unclear to me that you have this sort of balkanization where there are many different models, each of which is good in its own unique way, versus something like Lama becomes like, listen, this is a fine standard to build off of. We'll see, it's just like the upfront cost is so high. And I think for the people that have the money, the benefit of doing the pre-train is now less. Where I think it gets really interesting is how do you differentiate these and all of these different behavioral regimes? And I think the cost of producing instruction tuning and fine tuning data that creates specific kinds of behaviors, I think that's probably where the next generation of really interesting work starts to happen. If you see that the same model architecture trained on much more training data can exhibit substantially improved performance, it's the value of modeling innovations. For fundamental machine learning and AI research, there is still so much to be done. But I think that much lower hanging fruit, I guess, is developing new kinds of training data corpuses that elicit new behaviors from these models in a specific way. And so that's where, when I think about the availability to like a year ago, you had to have access to fairly high performance GPUs that were hard to get in order to get the experience of multiple reps fine tuning these models. And what you're doing when you take a corpus and then fine tune the model and then see across many inference passes, what is the qualitative character of the output, you're developing your own internal mental model of how does the composition of the training corpus shape the behavior of the model in a qualitative way. A year ago, it was very expensive to get that experience. And now you can just recompose multiple different training corpuses and see like, well, what do I do if I insert this set of demonstrations or I ablate that set of demonstrations? And that I think is a very, very valuable skill and one of the ways that you can have models and products that other people don't have access to. And so I think as more people, as those sensibilities proliferate because more people have that experience, you're gonna see teams that release data corpuses that just imbue the models with new behaviors that are especially interesting and useful. And I think that may be where some of the next sets of kind of innovation differentiation come from. Alessio [00:53:03]: Yeah, yeah, when people ask me, I always tell them the half-life of a model, it's much shorter than a half-life of a dataset. Mike [00:53:08]: Yes, absolutely. Alessio [00:53:09]: I mean, the pile is still around and like core to most of these training runs versus all the models people trained a year ago. It's like, they're at the bottom of the LMC's litter board. Mike [00:53:20]: It's kind of crazy, like I don't, just the parallels to other kinds of computing technology where like the work involved in producing the artifact is so significant and the like shelf life is like a week. You know, I'm sure there's a precedent, but it is remarkable. Alessio [00:53:37]: Yeah, I remember when Dolly was the best open source model. Mike [00:53:42]: Dolly was never the best open source model, but it demonstrated something that was not obvious to many people at the time. Yeah, but we always were clear that it was never state-of-the-art. Alessio [00:53:53]: State-of-the-art or whatever that means, right? This is great, Mike. Anything that we forgot to cover that you want to add? Any call, I know you're, you know, thinking about growing the team. Mike [00:54:03]: We are hiring across the board, AI engineering, classical machine learning, systems engineering and distributed systems, front-end engineering, design. We have many open roles on the team. We hire exceptional people. We fit the job to the person as a philosophy and would love to work with more incredible humans. Awesome. Alessio [00:54:25]: Thank you so much for coming on, Mike. Mike [00:54:26]: Thanks, Alessio. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

Mike Conover

Co-founder & CEO, Brightwave

BrightwaveDatabricks

The race is on for the first fully GPT3/4-equivalent, truly open source Foundation Model! LLaMA’s release proved that a great model could be released and run on consumer-grade hardware (see llama.cpp), but its research license prohibits businesses from running it and all it’s variants (Alpaca, Vicuna, Koala, etc) for their own use at work. So there is great interest and desire for *truly* open source LLMs that are feasible for commercial use (with far better customization, finetuning, and privacy than the closed source LLM APIs). The previous leading contenders were Eleuther’s GPT-J and Neo on the small end (FLAN-T5 (137B), PaLM (540B), and BigScience’s BLOOM (176B) on the high end. But Databricks is to my knowledge the first to release not just a cleanly licensed, high quality LLM that can run on affordable devices, but also a simple Databricks notebook that can be customized to be finetuned for your data/desired style - for $30 in 30 minutes on one machine! Mike Conover tells the story of how a small team of Applied AI engineers got convinced Ali Ghodsi and 5,000 of their coworkers to join in the adventure of building the first open source, instruction-following LLM, fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use. He also indulges our questions on other recent open source LLM projects, CerebasGPT and RedPajama, though we recorded this a week before Stability’s StableLM release. Stick around to the end for some easter eggs featuring AI Drake! Recorded in-person at the beautiful StudioPod studios in San Francisco. Full transcript is below the fold. Show Notes * Mike Conover LinkedIn and Twitter * Dolly 1.0 * Dolly 2.0 * CICERO and Diplomacy * Dolly and Deepspeed * LLMops: * https://nat.dev/ * PromptLayer * HumanLoop * Spreadsheets?? * Quadratic * Alessio’s Email GPT Drafter * Open Models * Open Assistant * Cerebras GPT * RedPajama * Reflexion, Recursive Criticism and Improvement * Lightning Round * AI Product: Google Maps * AI People: EleutherAI, Huggingface’s Stas Bekman * AI Prediction: Open LLaMA reproduction, AI Twins of People (AI Drake), Valuing Perplexity * Request for Startups: LLMOps/Benchmarks, Trail Mapping Timestamps * [00:00:21] Introducing Mike Conover * [00:03:10] Dolly 1.0 * [00:04:18] Making Dolly * [00:06:12] Dolly 2.0 * [00:09:28] Gamifying Instruction Tuning * [00:11:36] Summarization - Thumbnails for Language * [00:15:11] CICERO and Geopolitical AI Agents * [00:17:09] Datasets vs Intentional Design * [00:21:44] Biological Basis of AI * [00:23:27] Training Your Own LLMs * [00:28:21] You May Not Need a Large Model * [00:29:59] Good LLM Use cases * [00:31:33] Dolly Cost $30 on Databricks * [00:36:06] Databricks Open Source * [00:37:31] LLMOps and Prompt Tooling * [00:42:26] "I'm a Sheets Maxi" * [00:44:19] AI and Workplace Productivity * [00:47:02] OpenAssistant * [00:47:41] CerebrasGPT * [00:51:35] RedPajama * [00:54:07] Why Dolly > OpenAI GPT * [00:56:19] Open Source Licensing for AI Models * [00:57:09] Why Open Source Models? * [00:58:05] Moving Models * [01:00:34] Learning in a Simulation * [01:01:28] Why Model Reflexion and Self Criticism Works * [01:03:51] Lightning Round Transcripts [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio Partner and CT and Residence and Decibel Partners. I'm Joan Bama, cohost swyx Brighter and Editor of Space. Welcome, Mike. [00:00:21] Introducing Mike Conover [00:00:21] Hey, pleasure to be here. Yeah, so [00:00:23] we tend to try to introduce you so that you don't have to introduce yourself. Yep. [00:00:27] But then we also ask you to fill in the blanks. So you are currently a, uh, staff software engineer at Databricks. Uh, but you got your PhD at Indiana on the University of Bloomington in Complex Systems analysis where you did some, uh, analysis of clusters on, on Twitter, which I found pretty interesting. [00:00:43] Yeah. Uh, I highly recommend people checking that out if you're interested in getting information from indirect sources or I, I don't know how you describe it. Yes. Yeah. And then you went to LinkedIn working on. Homepage News, relevance, and then SkipFlag, which is a smart enterprise knowledge graph, which was then acquired, uh, by Workday, where you became director of machine learning engineering and now your Databricks. [00:01:06] So that's the quick bio and we can kind of go over Yeah. Step by step. But, uh, what's not on your LinkedIn that people [00:01:12] should know about you? So, because I worked at LinkedIn, that's actually how new hires introduce themselves at LinkedIn is this question. So I, okay. I have a pat answer to it. Uhhuh. Um, I love getting off trail in the backcountry. [00:01:25] Okay. And I, you know, I think that the sort of like radical responsibility associated to that is clarifies the mind. And I think that the, the things that I really like about machine learning engineering and sort of the topology of high-dimensional spaces kind of manifest when you think about a topographic mat as a contour plot. [00:01:44] You know, it's a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional space and it's very much like looking at information visualizations and you're trying to relate your. Localized perception of the environment around you and the contours of, uh, ridges that you see, or basins that you might go into and you're like, there's that little creek down there. [00:02:04] And relate that to the projection that you see on the map. I think it's physically demanding. It's intellectually challenging. It's natural. Beauty is a big part of it, and you're generally spending time with friends, and so I just, I love that. I love that these are camping trips. Uh, multi-day. Yeah. Yeah. [00:02:21] Camping. I, I hunt too, you know, I, um, shoot archery, um, big game back country hunting, but yeah. You know, sometimes it's just, let's take a walk in the woods and see where it goes. [00:02:32] Oh yeah. You ever think about going on one of those, um, journeys in the, uh, the Australian Outbacks? Like where people find themselves? [00:02:40] I'm [00:02:40] a mountain. I'm a mountain guy. I like to You're mountain guy. I like to fly fish. I like to, you like to hill climb? Yeah. Like the outback seems beautiful. I think eight of the 10 most deadly snakes live in Australia. Like I'm, uh, yeah, you're good. You're good. Yeah. Yeah. [00:02:52] Yeah. Any lessons from like, Real hill climbing [00:02:55] versus machine learning, hill climbing. [00:02:56] Great Dude. It's a lot like gradient descent. Yeah, for sure, man. Um, yeah, I that I have remarked on that to myself before for sure. Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure. This is like least resistance, please. [00:03:10] Dolly 1.0 [00:03:10] That's awesome. So Dolly, you know, it's kind of come up in the last three weeks you went from a brand new project at Databricks to one of the hottest open source things out there. [00:03:19] So March 24th you had Dolly 1.0. It was a 6 billion parameters model based on GPT-J 6 billion and you saw alpaca training set to train it. First question is, why did you start with GPT-J instead of LLaMA, which was what everybody else was kind of starting from [00:03:34] at the time. Yeah, well, I mean, so, you know, we had talked about this a little before the show, but LLaMA's hard to get. [00:03:40] We had requested the model weights and had just not heard back. And you know, I think our experience with the, um, The original email alias for Dolly, before it was available on hugging face, you get hundreds of people asking for it, and I think it's like, it's easy to just not be able to handle the inbound. [00:03:56] Mm-hmm. And so like, I mean, there was a practical consideration, which is that, you know, we did not have the LLaMA weights, but additionally I think it's like much more interesting if anybody can build it. Right. And so I think that was our, um, and I had worked with the GPT-J model in the past and, and knew it to be high quality from a grammatical ness standpoint. [00:04:15] And so I think it was a reasonable choice. Mm-hmm. Yeah. [00:04:18] Making Dolly [00:04:18] Yeah. Maybe we should, we can also go into the impetus of why you started work on Dolly. Uh, you had been at Databricks for about a year. Mm-hmm. Was there, was this like a top-down directive? Was this your idea? We'll see, uh, [00:04:31] what happened? I've been working in N L P and language understanding for a fair while now. [00:04:36] I mean certainly since Skip flag back in 20 16, 20 17, we can introduce Skip flag is that's, if that's, sorry. You know, we don't have to focus too much on it, but like, this is a, an area how information moves through networks of people is a longstanding interest of mine. And we built a hack day project and I just slacked it to our c e o and I was, you know, this was when ChatGPT came out and it was an integration into the developer experience. [00:05:02] And I was like, as a user, this should exist. I want this. Mm-hmm. We should build this. It doesn't have to be us. And I mean, to our, uh, our leadership team is like 10 years into this journey, probably more than that at Databricks. And they are still. So hungry. It's wild. It's just wild to see these, these people in action, you know, this like this far into the marathon. [00:05:23] And, um, he's like, great, build it. Do make it. So, you know, and I, we had have, uh, full-time responsibilities and infrastructure forecasting and infrastructure optimization. And so we did, you know, and, um, we just started building and, you know, so we'd been working on this class of technologies for, um, several months. [00:05:46] And we had a stack that in part how we were able to kind of pivot on the balls of our feet. Uh, we repurposed a lot of existing code that we had built up, you know, in the past several quarters, um, to, to create Dolly and, and just to [00:05:58] be clear, like is this an internal stack or is this, uh, externally available as data? [00:06:02] Much of what we open sourced what, you know, like that that is a, that is the, the, it's, I mean, no, it's not the exhaustive stack by any account, but it's, it's some of the core components. Okay. Yeah. [00:06:12] Dolly 2.0 [00:06:12] It only took 19 days to go from 1.0 to 2.0. Yeah. So 2.0 is 12 billion. So twist the number of parameters. You base this on the model family from Elu. [00:06:23] I instead, and I think the, the biggest change is like instead of using the alpaca turning set, which is change generated, so it has its own limitations, you created a brand new, uh, training data set created by the Databricks employees. So I would love to talk about how you actually made that happen. You know, did you just go around and say, Hey guys, I just need to like today, spend your day coming up with the instruction set? [00:06:47] Or like, did people volunteer to be a part of this? [00:06:50] Yeah, I mean, so again, like a lot of credit to our founding team, they see it, I think as much as anybody you'll talk to who is a new founder or somebody trying to work in this space, like our executives have the fire and will see a, a bright neon meta future that, uh, Databricks will confidently lead. [00:07:12] The world into. And so Ali just sent emails twice a day. Do it, do it. You know, we put together, you know, we, we use the InstructGPT sort of task families, you know, gen content generation, brainstorming close qa, open qa, paraphrasing, things like this, and basically put together these Google forms. [00:07:34] You know, just like, how can we build this as quickly as possible? We see this need, you know, the alpaca trick is amazing that it works. It's amazing that we're highly non-obvious that, you know, for GPT-J or even lLLaMA, you know, hundreds of billions of tokens into the train, this whisper of new data, you know, sort of moves it in, moves the parameter, uh, tensors into a new part of the state space. [00:08:02] I think, you know, my background is roughly in statistical physics related areas, and I think kind of like a phase transition. Mm-hmm. Like ice and water. It's like they're. Very, very little separates the two, but they could not be more different. And so Ali just kept haranging, like a huge email list of people. [00:08:21] Um, thousands and thousands of people. And, um, it worked. The other thing is, you know, to our employees credit, people see the moment and they wanna be part of something. And I think there's just passion and enthusiasm for. Doing this. So it was easier than you would expect [00:08:37] The answer is, so you put some answers in the blog post. [00:08:40] Yeah. And they're pretty comprehensive. Cuz one of the questions was like, how do I build a campfire? Yeah. And then the response was four paragraphs [00:08:46] of actual Truly, and I think Yeah, true. Yeah. And I think part of it is that because of the rapid adoption of these technologies like that, you have hundreds of millions of people, you know, who knows what the numbers are. [00:08:58] But on ChatGPT. People have become educated in terms of, and opinionated about what they expect from these tools. And so I think, you know, a lot of the answers are like, written in the style of what you would want from one of these assistants. And I think just to kind of like riff on how this question of like how the composition, cuz this is really re relevant to our enterprise customers, how the composition of the dataset qualitatively shapes the resulting behaviors of the fine-tuned models that are exposed to that stimulus. [00:09:28] Gamifying Instruction Tuning [00:09:28] You know, you look at a dataset like flan, which is a really, really large dataset that is, I think thousand plus tasks. Um, that's, you know, kind of this. Gold standard instruction data set, and a lot of it's synthesized the responses and we'll talk about evaluation, but the responses are very brief. You know, it's like emit the word positive or negative in relation to the, you know, as a judgment of the sentiment of this utterance. [00:09:52] And so it's, it's very multitask and I think like having thousands of different task types perform sort of irregular, you can't overfit to one specific behavior and so you have to compress and like do many things reasonably well. And so that I think you, you have to kind of wind up in interpolating between different types of behaviors that way. [00:10:12] But there's also like the question of like, when do you predict the end of sequence token? And if your completions, particularly for instruction tuning are short. Our empirical observation is that the fine tune model emits shorter results. And so having how to build a campfire. And like a narrative thoughtful human-like description. [00:10:36] I think it requires that demonstration to get that behavior from the model. And you had a, you had a leaderboard, um, who did [00:10:43] what, uh, any fun shenanigans that came out of, uh, the gamification? [00:10:46] Well, so the thing is like, you know, I think you can just ask people like be helpful. Uh, you know, like, like some people always take it too far and then Sure. [00:10:55] Yeah. Well, so you definitely see a long tail distribution. I think I was looking at the open assistant paper last night, and I think, I mean, don't quote me on this, but something like 12 people accounted for 10% of the total responses, which is super, that's just human systems have that long tail distribution terms of activity thing. [00:11:12] Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's not surprising. And we see that to a some degree in our data set as well, but, um, not in the way that you would if you opened it up to the, like internet at large. So I, I think people are incentivized coworkers. Yeah. Do the right thing and you know, it's, you know, and also it's our company. [00:11:29] Like we. Want it to actually be useful, not just a performance of usefulness. And I think people got that. [00:11:36] Summarization - Thumbnails for Language [00:11:36] Is there a task [00:11:37] that you found like particularly hard to get data on? Like good data summarization? [00:11:41] Oh, because it's like a, it's both like long, uh, it's long and requires thought, you know, you have to synthesize and as opposed to name all the people in places in this passage from Wikipedia that's like, I can kind of do that while I'm watching television, but like writing an essay. [00:11:59] Yeah, it's a compare is hard. Yeah, there's probably more structure and like in terms of um, like an information theoretic standpoint, how much new signal each record introduces into the model. I expect that summarization is actually. A very demanding task and would not soon become overfit. We're developing our, our, I don't have like definitive answers to how that works because we're still, it's an open research project for the, for the business. [00:12:27] Yeah. Well, I, you know, just categorically, I think sum summarization is becoming more important, the more generative ai. For freights because we kind of need to expand and we see the contract again, in terms of what, uh, what we consume in terms of, uh, [00:12:41] information. Truly. I mean, like, to kind of riff on that, I think the, there's just so much material at your business. [00:12:48] You think about like, uh, PRDs, like, or, you know, product requirement stocks, you know, reasonable people. You kind of want like a zoom lens on language and you want the ability to see the high level structure of something and then be able to get details on demand like you would pan or like, you know, zoom into an information visualization. [00:13:09] I was talking with. Um, The head of AI at Notion about this and who, you know, you guys probably know and as a really remarkable person, and this idea of like, what does a thumbnail for language look like? Because like your visual cortex is structured such that like it's highly evolutionarily conserved to be able to glance at something and perceive its essence. [00:13:28] And that makes seeing a field of thumbnails. Like you guys I think are gonna speak with, um, Lexi folks here shortly. And you can see us like the field of images in response to a query and get a sense for like, oh, these are all like moody cyber punk scenes. Mm-hmm. What is that for language? And maybe it's like, maybe it doesn't exist. [00:13:52] Maybe it's the case. Stop me if I'm getting too far afield here. But you think about clothes as a technology that has shaped our physiology. Right. Like, and our, our phen, our phenotypic expression, we used to be covered in hair. We evolved this technology fire would also be in this class, and our bodies changed in response to it on the very long time scale of human history. [00:14:15] Mm-hmm. It may be the case that AI in the way that the visual cortex has been evolutionarily conserved to be able to rapidly perceive things, shapes how we process information. I don't know. What to do about language right now. It looks like reading a lot of samples from different models and seeing how they perform as we move through the loss curve. [00:14:34] That makes [00:14:34] sense. I mean, if you think about images in text, you don't really have like peripheral vision. You know, when you're like seeing something, you focus on the main thing and then you kind of like start to expand to see the rest. Yes. Like text is kind of like a, the density is like the same across the tax. [00:14:49] Like nothing jumps out when you see a wall of tax versus when you see an NI image. Just like something usually jumps out first. Yes. So I don't have the answer either. Was gonna say, I'm really curious word [00:14:58] clouds, which, but that, that's the thing is like, that's such a joke, right? Wait for me. Yeah, it's like punchline. [00:15:06] You must have [00:15:06] done, you know, your, your Twitter [00:15:08] work. I've cut a few word clouds in my day. [00:15:11] CICERO and Geopolitical AI Agents [00:15:11] Um, you know, I also think like this question of like, what are you most excited about in ai? Like what do you see as the sort of like grandest potential? And one of the things that I reflect on is, is the. Possibility of having agents that are able to, to negotiate intractable geopolitical problems. [00:15:31] So like if you look at like, the Cicero paper from, from Meta, can you recap for those who are making Yeah. So I mean it's, you know, I don't wanna like represent somebody else's work as like you're just talking Yeah, exactly. But like, um, my understanding is that diplomacy is a, um, turn-based negotiating game, like risk where you are all making the decision in simultaneously and you're trying to convince people that you're going to do or not do something. [00:15:56] And, uh, this paper was co-authored with one of the top diplomacy players and Meta built a system that was very, very capable at this negotiating game. I. Can envision nation states operating ais that find game theoretically optimal and sort of non exploitable steady states basically. Mm-hmm. That, you know, if you think about a lot of the large scale geopolitical disputes where it's just like human mediators are unable to find a compromise, ais may be able to satisfying conditions that you're like, yeah, actually I don't, that works for me. [00:16:36] Mm-hmm. And to your point about like how the phobia and attention generally, but like how the actual visual cortex works, the idea that like a great writer says something in a way and it hits unique structures in your brain and you have that chemical cascade, which is understanding, we may be able to design systems that compress very long documents on a per person basis so as to maximize information transfer, and maybe that's what the thumbnail looks like. [00:17:03] Mm-hmm. [00:17:04] Yeah, maybe it's emojis all the way down. I dunno. [00:17:08] Yeah. [00:17:09] Datasets vs Intentional Design [00:17:09] Obviously the dataset is like one of the, the big things in Dolly. Yeah. But you talked about some of these technologies being like discover, not designed, like maybe talk a bit about the process that took it to Dolly and like the experimentation [00:17:21] there. [00:17:22] So it's not my, my friend, my dear friend, Jacob Burk kind of had this insight, which is that AI is you, you design a jet turbine, like for sure you make a plan. Mm-hmm. And you, you know, have some working model of aerodynamics and you execute on the jet turbine. I think that with ai, generally we see. You know, this instruction following behavior that we saw in Dolly was not present in the, the base model. [00:17:53] It, you know, effectively will, it's a, you know, very powerful base model, but it will just complete the prefix as though it's random page on the internet. We had Databricks, but also the community with Alpaca discovered that you can perturb them just, just so, and get quite different behavior. That was not really a design. [00:18:13] I mean, it's designed in the sense that you had an intent and then you saw it happen. But we do not like choose the parameters they are arrived upon. And the question that I have is, what other capabilities are latent in these models, right? GPT-J was two years old. Can it do anything else? That's surprising? [00:18:36] Probably so, and I think you look at, you know, particularly, and this is why the Pithia Suite is so cool, is that, and you know, a ton of credit to, for. Having this vision, and I think it will probably take some time for the research community to, to understand what to do with these artifacts that they've created. [00:18:54] But it's effectively like this matrix of model checkpoints and sizes where you say, I'm gonna take from I think 110 million all the way up to 12 billion, which is what Dolly two is based on. And then at every checkpoint through the training run under, I think it's 2 million. Yeah. Tokens. Yeah. Well, so the, I think the Pithia suite is just trained on the pile, so it's like three, 400 million, which is probably undertrained. [00:19:18] And did you guys see this red? I think it's red Pajama released this morning. They've reproduced the lLLaMA training data set. So, so it's 1.2 trillion tokens and it's, um, I mean, you know, a separate topic, but we looked pretty hard at what it would take to reproduce the LLaMA data set. And it's like, Non-trivial. [00:19:35] I mean, bringing Common Crawl online and then d near de-duping it and you know, filtering it for quality. So the, the Common Crawl data set in LLLaMA is they fit a model to predict whether a page in common crawl is likely to be a reference on Wikipedia. And so that's like a way to like, I don't want lists of phone numbers, for example, or like ads. [00:19:58] All of that is a lot of work. And so anyway, with Pit, I think we can start to ask questions like through this, this matrix with size and like checkpoint depth. We have these different model parameters. How do behaviors emerge through that training process? And at different scales, you know, maybe it will be less of a discovery process. [00:20:22] Maybe we will get more intentional about, like, I want to elicit the fol, I want summarization, I want closed form, question answering. Those are the only things that matter to me. How much data do I need to. Generate or buy, how many parameters do I need to solve that compression problem? And maybe it will become much more deterministic, but right now it feels a lot like we're just trying things and seeing if it works, which is quite different from a lot of engineering disciplines. [00:20:51] I'm curious, does that reflect your experiences? Like Yeah, I [00:20:54] think like we had a whole episode on, um, kind of like scaling loss and everything with Varun from Exafunction. And I feel like the, when the Chinch paper came out, a lot of teams look at their work and they were like, we're just kind of throwing darts. [00:21:07] Exactly. That's now one, [00:21:10] 1.2 to, uh, 1.7 tokens, uh, you know, per, uh, per parameter. And, uh, now we're redoing everything with [00:21:16] 20 tokens. It's exciting, but also as like, you know, I'm, I'm a, an engineer and a hacker, like I'm not a scientist, but I, you know, used to pretend to be a scientist. Not, you know, not really pretend, but like I respect the, I respect the craft and like, It's also very exciting to have something you really don't understand that well, because that's an opportunity to create knowledge. [00:21:41] So that's part of why it's such an exciting time in the field. There's some work [00:21:44] Biological Basis of AI [00:21:44] on with, um, understanding the development of AI progress, uh, using biological basis. Mm-hmm. So in, in some sense, we're a speed running evolution Yeah. With training. Yeah. So in a sense that of just natural discovery of things and, and just kind of throwing epox at it Yeah. [00:22:02] Is, makes intuitive sense to me. But, uh, I do think that it is unintuitive to estimate how different artificial life might evolve differently [00:22:12] from biological life. Yeah. I, so like Richard Dawkins had, um, this sort of toy model called bio morphs. Which, uh, no, I haven't heard of it. Yeah, it's, I think it was dates to the eighties. [00:22:25] So it's a pretty old school demonstration of capabilities. But the idea is that you have, imagine they look, they're little insects that look like vector art. And the parameters of how they are rendered are governed by, you know, it's parametric, right? So some of them have long antennas and some of them have wide bodies and some of them have 10 legs, some of them have four legs. [00:22:46] And the underlying method is, is genetic algorithms where you take subsets of the parameters and kind of recombine them. And you're presented as a user with a three by three grid, and you click based on what you find subjectively beautiful. And so the fitness function, then they're re combined and you render a new set of nine by nine, some of which are mutated. [00:23:05] And so the fitness function is your perception of aesthetic beauty. That is the pressure from the environment. And I think like with things like RLHF where you're having this preference learning task, that is a little different from next token prediction in terms of like what is synthetic life and how are our preferences reflected there? [00:23:23] I think it's a very sort of interesting, yeah, interesting area. Okay. So a [00:23:27] Training Your Own LLMs [00:23:27] lot of people are very inspired by work with Dolly. Obviously Databricks, uh, is doing it. Partially out of the kindness of your hearts, but also to advertise Databricks capabilities. Uh, how should businesses who want to do the similar things for their own data sets and companies, uh, how, how should they think about [00:23:43] going about this? [00:23:44] I really would actually say that it's probably less about advertising our capabilities. I mean, that, you know, we're exercising our capabilities, but I, I really think that to the extent that we can help define some of the moves that reasonable teams would make in creating technologies like this, it, it helps everybody understand more clearly what needs to be done to make it useful and not just interesting. [00:24:08] And so, one, you know, one of the canonical examples that we had in the original Dolly was write a love letter, ed Growlin Poe. Yep. Which is super cool and like very moody. You know, I, I dunno if you guys remember the particulars of it, but it was like, I. The person, the imagined person writing this letter was like, I, I basically couldn't, like, I couldn't stand you, but I can't stop thinking about you, you know, which is a very like, gothic, uh, kinda, uh, mood in, in a letter like that not relevant to the enterprise context. [00:24:39] Right. So, you know, like it's neat that it does it, but if I don't have to buy training data that gets it to write moody, gothic letters to Edgar and Poe, and if I can be choosy about how I invest my token budget, that is useful to many businesses. And so, you know, one of the things that. We're trying to understand more clearly is I, we talked a little bit about like different tasks require that you compress in a way that generalizes, you know, if you think about it, the, the parameters as compressing language and also world knowledge. [00:25:15] The question is like, for a given model size, how many demonstrations of summarization, for example, are required in order to get a really useful, grounded QA bot? And so I think in building these kinds of solutions and sort of seeing how the. Categories of behaviors in the instruction tuning or sort of fine tuning data sets are related to those behaviors, I think will develop a playbook for startups in the enterprise that makes it, um, so that you can move with an economy of motion. [00:25:44] And this is related to evaluations as well. So one of the things that we had talked about sort of before we started recording was the using the EleutherAI evaluation benchmarks, and I think helm and the, you know, there's a bunch of other batteries that you can push your models through. But the metrics that we looked at first when we built the first version of Dolly, and this is on our hanging face page, you can go see this yourself. [00:26:08] The GPT-J model. And the fine-tuned dolly model have almost identical benchmark scores, but the qualitative character of the model just couldn't be any more different. And so I think that it requires better ways to measure the desired behavior, and especially in these enterprise contexts where it's like, is this a good summary and how can I determine that without asking a person? [00:26:37] And maybe it's kind of like you train reward bottles where you, you know, you have sort of a learned preferences and then you show, you know, you take kind of an active learning approach where you show the ones that it's most uncertain about to crowd workers and it's kind of like human in the loop. [00:26:52] Would this be p p o ish? [00:26:54] I mean, potential. That's, so this, that's not an area of expertise in mine yet. You know, this is something that we're also trying to, uh, more deeply understand kind of what the applicability of that stack is to, like, I'm just trying to ship. Mm-hmm. You know, my understanding is that that's somewhat challenging to bring online and also requires a fair number of labels. [00:27:14] And so it's like from an active learning standpoint, uh, my thinking would be more like, You have a reward model that you've trained and you said like, this is based on human judgments from my employees or some crowd workers, what I want from a summarization or a close, close form question answering. And then you basically, you choose new examples to show to humans that are close to the decision boundary and that are like maximally confusing. [00:27:38] It's like, I'm just really not sure rather than things that are far from the decision boundary. And it's, it's kind of like, I actually think there's gonna be, in terms of value creation in the next, let's say 18 to 36 months, there's still room for like old tricks. You know, like not everything has to be generative AI for it to be very valuable and very useful. [00:27:56] And maybe, maybe these models and, and zero shot prompting just eats everything. But it's probably the case that like an ensemble of techniques will be valuable and that you don't have to, you know, establish like room temperature fusion to like, you know, create value in the world, at least for, you know, another year and a half. [00:28:20] You know, like [00:28:21] You May Not Need a Large Model [00:28:21] just, just to spell it out for people trying to, uh, go deep on stuff. Um, maybe leave breadcrumbs. Um, sure. When you say techniques, you don't just mean prompting. [00:28:29] Oh, I mean even like named entity recognition, like Yeah, there's just like classic NLP stuff, you know, like supervised learning. I mean, multi-class classifi. [00:28:37] I have customer support tickets. I want to know whether this is going to be flagged as. P zero. Like that's just, it's not a complicated problem to solve, but it's still very valuable in these models that can deeply understand the essence of something and not necessarily generate language. But understand, I expect that you will see like s because, so for example, inference right now is time consuming. [00:29:04] Mm-hmm. Just, you know, it's like, unless you are really rigorous, and I think it, one of the things I'm excited about at Databricks is that we're, our inference stack is very, very fast. Like orders of magnitude faster than you would get if you took the naive approach. And that leads to very qualitative, like a very different way that you interact with these models. [00:29:22] You can explore more and understand their behavior more when it doesn't take 30 or 40 seconds to generate a sample and it's instead 1800 milliseconds. You know, that's something that's very exciting. But if you need to spend your compute budget, Efficiently and you have tens of thousands of possible things that you could summarize, but you can really only, you know, in a day do so many. [00:29:45] Having some stack ranking of them with a classical machine learning model is just valuable. And I, I expect that you'll see like an ecosystem of tools and that it's not all going to be necessarily agents talking to agents. I could be proven wrong on that. Like, I, I don't know. We'll see. Hey, [00:29:59] Good LLM Use cases [00:29:59] going back to the evolutionary point, I feel like people think that the generative AI piece is like the one with the most like, uh, possible branches of the tree still to explore. [00:30:09] So they're all focusing on that. But like you said, we're probably gonna stop at some point and be like, oh. That thing we were doing is just as good. Let's pair them together and like use that instead of just like trying to make this model do everything. [00:30:22] Yeah. And there, yeah, there are things like categorically that only generative models can accomplish. [00:30:28] And I do think, I mean, one of the reasons that at Databricks we see so much value for companies is that you can, with zero shot prompting, you can say, given this customer support ticket, for example, give me a summary of the key issues represented in it. And then simply by changing that prefix, say, write a thoughtfully composed reply that addresses these issues in the tone and voice of our company. [00:30:53] And imagine you have a model that's been fine tuned on the tone voice that's in your, in your, uh, from your support team. Both of those problems historically would've taken like a reasonable machine learning team, six to eight weeks to build. And frankly, the right, the response, I'm not sure you can do it without generative techniques. [00:31:13] And now your director of sales can do that. You know, and it's like, the thing that might make me look foolish in retrospect is that. Orders of magnitudes cheaper to do it with prompting. And maybe it's like, well, sure the inference costs are non-trivial, but it's just we've saved all of that in time. I don't know. [00:31:33] Dolly Cost $30 on Databricks [00:31:33] We'll see. I'm [00:31:34] always interested in, uh, more economics of, um, of these things. Uh, and one of the headline figures that you guys put out for Dolly was the $30 training cost. Yes. How did you get that number? Was it. Much lower than you expected and just let's just go as deep [00:31:50] as you want. Well, you just think about, so you know, we trained the original dolly on a 100 s and so one of the cool things about this is we're doing this all on Databricks clusters, right? [00:32:00] So this like, this works out of the box on Databricks and like turns out, you know, I think you would probably need slightly different configurations if you were going to do your own full pre-training run on, you know, trillions of tokens. You have to think about things like network interconnect and like placement groups in the data center in a more like opinionated way than you might for spark clusters. [00:32:23] But for multi-node distributed fine tuning, the Databricks stack is great out of the box. That was wonderful to find. [00:32:32] You've been building the perfect fine tuning architecture the whole [00:32:34] time. Yeah. You know, may, maybe it's not perfect yet, but like, It's pretty good. And I think, so for the original Dolly, it was just a single node, and so you can bring up an eight node, a 100 machine, and I'm, you know, I thinking of just the off the rack pricing from the cloud providers, it's about 30 bucks. [00:32:55] I think the actual number's probably less than $30. For How long are you for? It was less than an hour to train the thing. It's 50, I mean it's 50 thou alpacas, 50,000 records. Right. [00:33:04] And you've open sourced the, the notebook, which people can check out what [00:33:07] gonna show notes. There's. The risk that I am making this up is zero. [00:33:11] Yeah. No, no, no. I'm not, I'm [00:33:12] not saying the I know you're not. I'm just saying I'm, I'm, I'm leaving break rooms for people to say, Hey, it, it's 30 [00:33:17] bucks, takes an hour. Go do it. It's, it's crazy. And, and that's like the, I mean, you think about, I yeah, I, I, I know for a fact that you're not suggesting that, but it's just like, what's nuts is that you can just try it. [00:33:28] You know, you can, if you have 30 bucks, you can stand this thing up and, um, on a single machine, execute this training run. And I think I talked about like this idea that it's kind of like a phase transition. What's surprising about it, if you were to say, Hey, given a corpus of millions of instruction pairs, you can for. [00:33:50] $10,000, which is still an order of magnitude less than it cost to train the thing, get this qualitatively different behavior. I'd be like, yeah, that that sounds about right. And it's like, yeah, if you have an afternoon, like you can do this. That was not certainly, it was not obvious to me that that was true. [00:34:08] I think especially like, you know, like with libraries, like deep speed that, you know, so deep speed is a, is a library that gives you many different options for dealing with models that don't fit in memory and helping increase the effective batch size by, you know, for example, putting the entire model on a GP on several different GPUs and then having device local batches that are then the gradients are, are accumulated, are sort of aggregated for those, those from those different devices to get an effective batch or sharding the actual different model submodules across GPUs. [00:34:43] And this is all available in the notebook and the, the model that we train does not fit on a single device. And so you have to shard the model across the GPUs to run the training, you know, an incredible time that like this technology is just like free and open source and it's like the Microsoft team and the, you know, the hugging face team have made it so easy. [00:35:04] To accomplish things that even just two years ago really required a PhD. And so it's like level of effort, capital expenditure, substantially less than I would've expected. Yeah. [00:35:17] And you, you sort of co-evolve this cuz you also happen to work on the infrastructure optimization [00:35:21] team. Yeah, I mean that's kind of, um, like, you know, this is really kind of a separate project at Databricks, which is like making sure that we have a great customer experience and that we have the resources that are required for all of our customers. [00:35:37] You can push a button, get a computer, uh, get a Spark cluster. And I think when you look to a world where everybody is using GPUs on Databricks, making sure that we are running as efficiently as possible so that we can make Databricks a place that is extremely cost effective to train and operate these models. [00:35:55] I think you have to solve both problems simultaneously. And I think the company that does that effectively is, um, is gonna create a lot of value for the market. [00:36:06] Databricks Open Source [00:36:06] Yeah. You mentioned Spark, obviously Databricks, you know, Started, like the founders of Databricks created a spark. Yeah. At Berkeley. Then, you know, from an open source project, you start thinking about the enterprise use cases. [00:36:18] You end up building a whole platform. Yeah. You still had a lot of great open source projects like uh, ML Flow, Delta Lakes. Yeah. Um, yeah. Things like that. How are you thinking about that was kind of the ML ops phase. Yeah. Right. As you think about the l lm ops, like needs, you know, like obviously. We can think of some of these models as the spark, so to speak, of this new generation. [00:36:39] Like what are some of the things that you see needed in infrastructure and that maybe you're thinking about building? [00:36:44] Yeah, I mean, um, so kind of first to address this, this matter of open source. I think, you know, Databricks has done a lot of things that, and has released into the public domain a lot of technologies where a reasonable person could have said, you should. [00:37:00] Treat that as IP that you and no one else has. And I think time and again, the story has been more, is better and we all succeed together. And when you create a new class, people rush in to fill it with ideas and use cases and that it's, it's really powerful. It's both good business and it's good for the community. [00:37:21] And Dolly I think is very much a natural extension of that urge, which just, I think reflects our founders tastes and beliefs about markets and, and technology [00:37:31] LLMOps and Prompt Tooling [00:37:31] when it comes to LM ops, which is not a phrase that rolls off the tongue. We'll, we're gonna need something better than that. We, this kinda gets back to like what is a thumbnail for text. [00:37:43] Mm-hmm. One of the things that my team winds up doing a fair amount of right now is like slacking back and forth examples of like generated samples. Okay. Because like these evaluation benchmarks do not capture the behaviors of interest. And so we often have like a reference battery of prompts. Let's say 50 to a hundred. [00:38:03] Write a love letter to Edgar and Poe. Yeah. Give me a list of ins. Like what are, what are one of our things is what are considerations? Like it should keep in mind when planning for a backcountry backpacking trip can you generate a list of reasonable suggestions for a backpacking trip. And you see, as you kind of move the model through the loss curve under instruction tuning that um, that behavior emerges and that like you kind of wind up qualitatively evaluating is the model doing what I want in respect to these prompts that I've seen many different models answer this model or this, this instruction tuning data set is generating shorter completions. [00:38:40] This one is generating the. Wackier completions, you know, this one is much likelier to produce lists all of these things. I don't know if you've seen Nat Devrel. Mm-hmm. I'm sure, of course you have that idea of the grid of like, I want to run inference in parallel on arbitrary prompts and compare and contrast, like tooling like that is going to make it, and especially with a fast inference layer, and this is where I think Databricks has a lot of opportunity to create value for people is being able to serve, interact, and measure the behavior of the model as it changes over time and subject it not only to quantitative. [00:39:19] Benchmarks, but also qualitative subjective benchmarks plus human in the loop feedback where imagine that I burn a model checkpoint and every thousand steps, I send it off to an annotation team and I get a hundred pieces of human feedback on the results. And it's like there's kind of like what is the right volume of human feedback to get to statistical significance? [00:39:43] But I think there is. An ensemble, you know, each of these is like a different perspective on the behavior of the model. A quantitative, qualitative, and then human, uh, feedback at scale. Somebody's going to build a product that does these things well in a delightful user form factor. And that is fast and um, addresses the specific needs of AI developers. [00:40:04] And I think that business will be very successful and I would like for it to be Databricks. Ah, okay. [00:40:10] Teasing what you might be [00:40:11] building. Interesting. You know, and this, not to make forward-looking statements, but it's just like, make sense as obvious as a person, you wanna do it? Mm-hmm. I need that. Yeah. [00:40:19] Yeah. I need that. Yeah. I happen to work at a company. [00:40:21] Yeah. So just to push on, uh, uh, this one a little bit, cuz I have spent some time looking into this. Sure. Have you come across prompt layer? That would be one of the leading tools. And then I think Human Loop has a little bit of it, but yes, it's not a course focus of theirs, is it? [00:40:34] Prompt layer? Yeah. I'll, okay. Send And happy to drop that reference cuz uh, he has reached out to me and I, I looked at his demo video and it, yeah, it kind of is, isn't that in the ballpark? And I think there are a lot of people, uh, zeroing in on it. But the reason I have not done anything in, in, in this area at all is because I could just do it in a spreadsheet. [00:40:51] Like all you need to do is Yeah. [00:40:53] Spreadsheet function that you can, but I mean like editing text and Google Sheets is a drag. Is it? Yeah. I, I mean mm-hmm. What's missing? You know? Oh, so a, like the text editing experience in it, like you're trying to wrap these cells. Okay. And so now you gotta like double click to get into the editing mode. [00:41:12] I think they struggle with large record sets. So like the spreadsheets slow down, you kind of want, this is not some, like a, this specific question of like, how does Google Sheets fail to meet the need is something that, you know, I don't have a talk track around Sure. But like linking it to an underlying data source where it's sort of like persisted. [00:41:34] Cuz now I'm, now I have a bunch of spreadsheets that I'm managing and it's like, those live on in Google Drive, which has kind of a garbage ui. Or is it on my local machine? Am I sending those around? Like, if, can I lock the records so that they can't be annotated later? How do I collect multiple evaluations from different people? [00:41:50] How do I compute summary statistics across those evaluations? Listen, I'm the first person to like, fire up sublime. Yeah. You know, like, keep it simple, right? Yeah. Just for sure. I feel like the, the way that I have talked with colleagues about it is it's like we are emailing around. Photocopies of signed printouts of PDFs and DocuSign doesn't exist yet, and nobody realizes that they're doing this like ridiculous dance. [00:42:16] And I get it. I too have used Google Sheets to solve this problem, and I believe that they're, there's maybe something better. I've Stockholm Syndrome. [00:42:26] "I'm a Sheets Maxi" [00:42:26] So there's a couple more that I would highlight, uh, which is Quadra. Uh, okay. Uh, full disclosure, an investment of mine, but basically Google Sheets implement, implemented a web assembly. [00:42:35] Yeah. And a, and a canvas. Okay. And it speaks Python and sql. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and Scala. Yeah. Uh, so I, I think, I think, yeah, there, there's some people working on interesting hearings [00:42:46] at those. And what you could do is like, like imagine that you have a Google Sheets type ui, the ability to select like a column or a range and subject all of those values to a prompt. [00:42:59] Yes. And like say like, I have template filling and I want, that's what I want. My problem [00:43:04] with most other SaaS attempts is people tend to build UIs that get in your way of just free range experimentation. Yes. And I'm a sheet's, uh, maxi. Like if I can do it in a sheet, I'll do [00:43:16] in a sheet, you know? Yeah. Well, and I mean, kind of to continue, like on the sheets, sort of mining that vein, you know, on the, sort of like how does AI impact the workplace and like human productivity? [00:43:29] I think like a, I really like the metaphor, which is comparing, uh, AI technologies to the development, the advent of spreadsheets in the eighties, and this idea that like you had a lot of professionals who were like well educated, like serious people doing serious accounting and finance work, who saw as their kind of core job function manually calculating. [00:43:53] Values in forecasts on paper as like, this is how I create value for the business. And spreadsheets came along and I think. There was a lot of concern that like, what am I gonna do? Yeah. With my days? And it turns out that like I think of it sometimes, like being in a warm bath and you don't notice how nice the water is until you wiggle your toes a little bit. [00:44:14] You kind of get used to your circumstances and you stop noticing the things that would stand out. [00:44:19] AI and Workplace Productivity [00:44:19] So on the subject of how artificial intelligence technologies will shape productivity in the workplace, you have, I think, a good metaphor in comparing this to spreadsheets and the Adventist spreadsheets In the eighties, I think you had a lot of really serious people who were taking, making an earnest effort to be as productive and effective as possible in their lives, who were not making it their business to waste time. [00:44:42] Saw spreadsheet technology come out and it's like, man, well what am I gonna do? I'm the person that calculates things. Like I write it all down and that's how I create value. And then like you start using this new tool and it's like, oh, it turns out that was the Ted most tedious and least rewarding part of my job. [00:44:58] And I'm just so, you know, like I have, like, I still have that human drive to create. You just kind of point it at like more pressing and important problems. And I think that, that we probably don't, especially, and even when it comes to writing, which feels like a very like quintessentially human and creative act, there's a lot of just formulaic writing that you have to do. [00:45:22] Oh yeah. And it's like, maybe I shouldn't be spending my time on all of that kind of boiler plate. And, you know, there's a question of like, should we be spending our time reading boilerplate? And if so, why is there so much boiler plate? But I, I think that humans are incredibly resourceful and incredibly perceptive as to how they can be effective. [00:45:43] And that, you know, the, I think it will free us up to do much more useful things with our time. I think right now [00:45:50] there's still a, a bit of a stigma around, you know, you're using the model mm-hmm. To generate some of the text. But I built a open source, like a email drafter. Yeah. So for all of my emails, I get a G PT four pre-draft response. [00:46:04] And a lot of them I just sent, but now I'm still pretending to be me. [00:46:07] Okay. So that's why I'm talking to you [00:46:09] When I talk to you, you need to fine tune it. Right. [00:46:12] But in the future, maybe it's just gonna be acceptable that it's like, Hey, we don't actually need to spend this time, you and I talking. Yes. It's like, let the agents like cash it out and then come back to us and say, this [00:46:22] is what you're gonna do next. [00:46:23] Articulate your preferences and then you, I think this like trustworthiness is a piece of this here where like hallucinations, T b D, whether it is like actually attractable problem or whether you need other affordances like grounded methods to, to sort of. Is a hallucination, just a form of creativity, like, we'll see. [00:46:42] But um, I do think eventually we'll get to a point where we can, we trust these things to act on our behalf. And that scenario of like calendaring, for example, or just like, you know, even working out contract details, it's like, Just let me tell you exactly what I want and you make sure that you faithfully represent my interests. [00:47:00] That'll be really powerful. [00:47:02] OpenAssistant [00:47:02] So we haven't run this by you, but uh, I think you have a lot of opinions about, you know, the projects that are out there, uh mm-hmm. And three that are, are on mine. For one, you've already mentioned Open Assistant two, cereus, G B T also came out roughly in the same timeframe. I'm not sure if you want to comment on it, I'd like to compare because they, they also had a similar starting point as as you guys, and then three Red Pajama, which, uh, was just out this morning. [00:47:24] Yeah. We might, as might as well get a soundbite from you on your thoughts. So yeah, if you want to pick one, what was the first one? Uh, open Assistant. [00:47:30] Yeah. So, I mean, open Assistant is awesome. I love what they've done. I will be eager to use their free and open data set, uh, to improve the quality of Dolly three. [00:47:41] CerebrasGPT [00:47:41] Yeah, but also just like we're seeing the, the training is, so Cerus is a good example of, you know, I think they were, my understanding, and I don't know that team or really, you know, I haven't looked too closely at the technology, but I have worked with the model is that it's a demonstration of their capabilities on this unique chip that they've designed where they don't have to federate the models out to multiple cards. [00:48:04] But I think if you look at some of the benchmarks, it is on par or maybe a little shy of some of the Ethe I models. And I think that one of the things that you may see here is that the market for foundation models and like the importance of having your own foundation model is actually not that great. [00:48:27] That like you have a few. Core trains that people, I think of these kind of like stem cells where, you know, a stem cell is a piece of is, is a cell that can become more like its surrounding context. It can become anything upon differentiation when it's exposed to eye tissue or kidney tissue. These foundation models sort of are archetypal and then under fine tuning become the specific agent that you have a desire for. [00:48:53] And so I think they're expensive to train. They take a long time to train. Even with thousands of GPUs, I think you're still looking at like a month to stand up some of these really big models, and that's assuming everything goes correctly. And so what Open Assistant is doing is. I think representative of the next stage, which is like open data sets, and that's what the Dolly release is also about, is, I kind of think of it like an upgrade in a video game. [00:49:21] I don't play a ton of video games, but I, you know, I, I used to, and I'm familiar with the concept of like, your character can now double jump. Mm-hmm. Right. Great. You know, it's like, here's a data set that gives it the ability to talk to you. Hmm. Here's a data set that gives it the ability to answer questions over passages from a vector index. [00:49:38] I think anybody who's listening, I think there's a tremendous opportunity to create a lot of value for people by going through this exercise of the unsexy work, of just writing it down and figuring out ways to do that at scale. Some of that looks like semi-synthetic methods, so something I would love to see from the Dolly data set. [00:49:58] Is paraphrasing of all the prompts. So basically you now have multiple different ways of saying the same thing and you have the completions which are correct answers to different variants of the question. I think that will act as like a regular, it's kind of like image augmentation. I was gonna say, you flip it. [00:50:13] Yeah. Yeah. I believe that that will work for language. Like one of the things you could do. Cause we, we saw that within 24 hours the dataset had been translated into Spanish and Japanese. The dolly dataset. Yeah, it was, I mean, you know, it's maybe, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that's super cool. Um, and also something that is only possible with open data. [00:50:31] Well, it's only useful with open data, but I just last night was thinking like, I wonder if you could to paraphrase, cuz it's not obvious to me like what the best and state of the most state-of-the-art paraphrasing model is. You could use Google Translate potentially and take the prompt. Translate it to Spanish and then translate it back to English, you get a slightly different way of saying the same thing. [00:50:54] Ah, right. So I think the self instruct paper is really about like few shot prompting to get more prompts and then using large models to get completions and then using human annotators to judge or train a reward model. I think that bootstrapping loop on the back of these open data sets is going to create multimillion scale training corpuses. [00:51:14] And so I, what Open Assistant has done is a, it's a great model. I don't know if you've tried their interactive chat, but it's just really quite an impressive accomplishment. But that the gesture towards open data that you know, the Dolly dataset and the open assistant dataset represent, I think is probably gonna define the next six to nine months of. [00:51:35] RedPajama [00:51:35] Work in this space. Um, and then the red, a red pajama. Red pajama, I mean, yeah, it's like I said, you can do a close read of the LLaMA paper. There's the dataset section and I think they use seven distinct data sets, archive, and I think maybe Stack exchange and common crawl. [00:51:50] Okay. So they have common crawl. [00:51:52] Yep. C4, which is Common crawl, but filtered subset. Yeah. Uh, GitHub archive books. Wikipedia Stack Exchange. [00:51:59] Yes. So, you know, take Common Crawl, for example, when you read the lLLaMA paper. So a common crawl I think is three terabytes in the lLLaMA paper. It's not something you just download from, like it's, you have to produce this data set, or at least the CC net, um, implementation that they reference there. [00:52:18] And you have like a single paragraph in this research paper dedicated to how they produce Common Crawl and they do near de-duplication. They train a model to predict whether something is likely to be a link, a reference link on Wikipedia. And there's just a bunch of other stuff that. Not only from like a, where do you get the model to predict whether something is a link as a reference on Wikipedia when you train it and then like where's your cut point? [00:52:41] You know, now you have kinda this precision recall trade off and it's like those decisions have material impacts on the quality and the character of the model that you learn. But also just from a scale standpoint, like building Common Crawl locally requires like a non-trivial distributed systems left. [00:52:59] And so I think Red Pajama is, and I think it's Mila and Chris Ray's lab hazy research, I think, or at least he's attached and together and I think together is kind of leading. There's a bunch of great teams behind that and so I have no reason to think they didn't do. The hard, difficult work correctly. [00:53:21] Yeah. And now is this major piece of the lift if you're wanting to do a lLLaMA repro in public. And I think that's would very naturally be the next step. And I would be kind of surprised if a train was not currently underway. Everybody agrees. LLLaMA is very, very strong. Also, we agree that it is not open incentives for somebody to spend a couple million bucks and produce it and then be the team that opened this architecture is, are quite high. [00:53:50] Mm-hmm. So I, I think in the next, you know, you asked for like predictions. I think we're five months at most away from a open LLaMA clone that is as high quality as, as what meta is produced. I will be disappointed if that's not the case. [00:54:07] Why Dolly > OpenAI GPT [00:54:07] And I think like there's the big distinction between what is open and what is like, Open in a way that is commercially usable. [00:54:13] Yeah. After that, I know the Dolly two post, you mentioned that you had a lot of inbound with Dolly. Yeah. 1.0. But a lot of businesses could not use it. Yeah. Because of where the data training data came from. Yes. What are some of the use cases that people have? There is, uh, a lot of it kind of like talking to your data. [00:54:30] Are there like, uh, other things that are maybe people are not thinking about using it for? [00:54:34] Yeah, so I mean, we have a number of customers who have reached out with really concrete use cases around customer support ticket resolution. One of the things that a lot of business open AI's models are incredibly powerful, and Databricks wants to be a business where you can use the right tool for the job. [00:54:55] Like if you have information from the public web, let's say you have forum posts, right, that you need to synthesize and process, that's just not sensitive information. You should be able to use truly whatever model. That might be a fine-tuned model that is like laser focused on your problem. It might be a general instruction following model and, and sort of whatever kind of intelligence GPT4 is, it's, you know, it's quite powerful. [00:55:20] You should be able to use those tools. There are definitely use cases in the enterprise where it's like, I either just, I'm not interested in sharing this ip. You know, these are effectively our state secrets. Or from a regulatory and compliance standpoint. I just can't send this data to a third party sub-process or something. [00:55:38] Even as quotidian is like, I just really don't want to go through procurement on this. You know, like it's kind of around those, um, I have some reasons to keep this in house. A lot of use cases like that and that, you know, I'm not a lawyer and so I won't speculate on the sort of actual licensing considerations or the actual obligations, but it's just like people like to be able to move confidently and what we've done with Dolly is make it super clear. [00:56:09] This model and this data set are licensed for commercial use. You can build a business on the back of this. And that, I think is a big part of why the response has been so positive. [00:56:19] Open Source Licensing for AI Models [00:56:19] Hugging face has, uh, the rail license responsible, um mm-hmm. AI license, which isn't recognized as open source yet. So that was the whole problem with stable diffusion, that it's just unclear cuz this, this is completely new license that is, uh, unproven. [00:56:32] But I just find it interesting that the existing open source licensing regime is mostly around code. And right now, you know, the, the value has shifted from code to the waits. [00:56:43] Yes. I think we can go on a three hour rant about the open source initiative and like who decides what an open source license is. [00:56:51] But I think there's a, I think the approach of like, hey, We know what commercial uses. Like this is good for it. Yes, it's good. You're not gonna have to worry about us suing you. It's like, you know, the semantics of it. Clear is always better. Exactly. It's like we don't need to be approved by the osi. Yeah. [00:57:07] You're gonna be okay. Just [00:57:09] Why Open Source Models? [00:57:09] to kind of like continue, like why open source? Yeah. I think that like it is with many eyes, all bugs are shallow. I think the reality is that like we do not know what the challenges we face with AI systems will be. Mm-hmm. And that the likelihood that we can get it a representative and comprehensive solution to the challenges they present by putting it in public and creating research artifacts that people who deal with ethics bias, ai, safety, security, these really sort of thorny issues, that they can take a hard look at how the actual thing is built and how it works and study it comprehensively rather than, Hey, we've got a team for that. [00:57:50] You're gonna mm-hmm. Just, you're just, we're just gonna need you to trust our work. I think I wanna be in that the former future rather than sort of like, I, I hope that people have done this correctly. I hope that this is somebody is taking care of this. [00:58:05] Moving Models [00:58:05] When people [00:58:06] evaluate this, how do you think about moving between models? [00:58:10] You know, obviously we talked about how the data set kind of shapes how the model behaves. Hmm. There's obviously people that might start on open AI and now they wanna try dollies. Yeah. Like what are some of the infrastructure there that maybe needs to be built to allow people to move their prompts from model to model? [00:58:26] Like to figure out, uh, how that works. [00:58:28] That's really interesting. Um, because you see even like moving between GPT3.5 and GPT4 that the behavior, like some things that were not possible on three five are No, I mean, many, many things that were not possible on three five are not possible on four, but you kind of want like slightly different problem formula, like slightly different prompt formulations or. [00:58:51] It's kind of like you want regression tests for prompts, and you could see like an automated system, which is uh, helps design a prompt such that the output of this new model is isomorphic to the outputs of the previous model. And sort of like using a language model to iterate on the prompt. So it just kind of evolves it to like adapt to the new model. [00:59:13] I have two beautiful boys who are, they're just incredible humans and my friend Ben and I built them a, an interactive choose your own adventure storytelling book that uses ChatGPT to generate stories and then options within those stories, and then uses open AI's image generation model Dolly to illustrate. [00:59:36] Those options. And then the kids can kind of choose their way through these stories. And the thing that you really like when you start to really push these things for more than just like single turn prompt response and I'm, I'm, you know, it's fine if it's language and you really need it to be like an api. [00:59:52] Is that like 19 times out, 20 it's like an p i and then the 20th generation. It's like just a totally different format. And he just like, you really like try to in the system prompt really seriously. I just only want you to give me three options. Yeah. And letter A, B, C, you know, I think that from a regression test standpoint, how do you know, like if I run this prompt a hundred times does a hundred out of a hun, does it come back a hundred out of a hundred in the format and sort of character that I require? [01:00:21] That's not something a person can really do effectively, and so I think you do need sort of model meta models that judge the outputs and that manage those migrations. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I had, that's an interesting. Product class. I hadn't thought about it too much. Yeah. [01:00:34] Learning in a Simulation [01:00:34] When you mentioned before the example of the, you know, back country trip, I was like, yeah, it would be so cool if you had a, like a simulation where like, okay, this is the list you had. [01:00:44] Now I have this game where like I'm putting a character with that inventory and see if they survive in the back country. Cause you can like, you know, the first time I went to Yellowstone to camp, I forgot to pack like a fly for my tent and obviously it rained. That's because, you know, you get punished [01:00:58] right away. [01:00:59] Yeah. That's the environment providing you with a gradient. Exactly. Update your model eight. You should be grateful to have such an excellent Yeah. Mini [01:01:06] these models like the, the evolutionary piece that is missing is like, these models cannot. Die. They cannot break a arm. They cannot, when they make suggestions, like they don't actually Yeah. [01:01:16] Have any repercussion on them. Um, so I'm really curious if in the future, you know, okay, you wanna make a poem, uh, you know, I love poem. Now we're gonna send this structural people. Yeah. And if you get rejected, your model's gonna [01:01:28] Why Model Reflexion and Self Criticism Works [01:01:28] die. So I think like one of the things that's cool about Lang Chain, for example, we all know they're doing awesome work and building useful tools, but these models can tell if they're wrong. [01:01:38] So you can, like, you can ask a model to generate an utterance. And that next token prediction loss function may not capture. You may hallucinate something, you may make something up, but then you can show that generation to the same model. And ask it to tell you if it's correct or not. And it can, it can recognize that it's not, and I think that is a directly a function of the attention weights and that you can attend to the entire. [01:02:03] Whereas like for next token prediction, all I can see is the prefix and I'm just trying to choose and choosing sarcastically. Right. You're f frequently, like it's a weighted sample from the distribution over that soft softmax output vector, which does not have any. Reference to factuality, but when you resubmit to the model and you give it like, here's the entire generated passage, judge it in its completeness. [01:02:25] Well now I can attend to all of the token simultaneously, and it's just a much, much easier problem to solve. And so I think that like, oh, that's a cool insight. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, yeah. It's just, this is reflection. Yeah. You, you can just see what you said and like the model may contain enough information to judge it. [01:02:41] And so it's kind of like subject your plan mm-hmm. To an environment and see how it performs. I think like you could probably ask the model, I mean, we can try this today. Here's my plan for a trip. Critique it. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, what are, what are the things that could go wrong with this inventory? And I think that there's one scenario, there's one trajectory for this class of technologies, which would be like self-reflexive models where it is not super linear. [01:03:10] You don't get anything more than what is already contained in the models, and you just kind of saturate and it's like, okay, you need human feedback. There's another scenario, which is the alpha go scenario where models can play themselves and in observing their behavior and interactions they. Get stronger and better and more capable. [01:03:31] That's a much more interesting scenario and this idea that like in considering the entire generated sample, I have more insight than just when I'm sampling the next token. Mm-hmm. Suggests that there may. Be that escape potential in terms of getting super, you know, unsaturated returns on quality. [01:03:51] Lightning Round [01:03:51] Yeah, this was great, Mike kind of we're where a time, maybe we can jump into landing ground next. [01:03:55] We'll read you the questions again. Okay. If you wanna think about it. So, okay. Favorite AI [01:04:00] product? This is a boring answer, but it's true. Google Maps. Ah. And it's, how is it AI A, they're recently doing stuff with Nerf so that you can using Yeah. Multiple different photos. You can explore the interior of a business. [01:04:15] They are also undoubtedly, I mean like, I don't know the team at Google doing this, but digesting the sum total of human knowledge about each entity in their graph to like process that language and make judgements about what is this business? And listen, it's not an AI product, but it is a machine learning product categorically, and it's also an amazing product. [01:04:37] You forget how much you use it. I was at the coffee shop around the corner. I used it to figure out where to come. It was literally 150 meter walk, you know, it's just like that reflexive, but it's also from a, an information visualization. So I love maps. Mm-hmm. I opened our conversation saying that I think a lot about maps, that it is adaptive at multiple scales and will corson and refine the, the information that's displayed requires many, many judgements to be made and sim simultaneously about what is relevant and it's personalized. [01:05:08] It will take your intent. Are you driving? Okay, well show me parking garages preferentially. So it's very adaptive in such subtle ways that we don't notice it. And I think that's like great product design is like good editing. You don't notice it when it's good. Mm-hmm. And so I think Google Maps is an incredible AI ml. [01:05:28] Product accomplishment. Google Maps. Yeah. It's a great pick. Great. Well, and they need the help. Yeah. [01:05:36] It is actually the best ad uh, real estate, right? Like, there should be a ton of people buying ads specifically on Google Maps. Yeah. So they just show up and I, I don't know how big that business is, but it's gotta be huge. [01:05:45] Yeah. And, and then my subsequent thing is like, there should be Google Maps optimization, where you would name your business like Best Barbershop and it would show up as Best Barbershop when you look at it. Yeah, [01:05:55] of course. Right? Yeah. It's like AAA lock picks. Yeah. Right at the front of the Yellow Pages. [01:06:01] Favorite [01:06:01] AI people and communities you wanna shout out? [01:06:03] You know, I don't think that I have necessarily anything super original to say on this front. Um, The best of my understanding, this is an all volunteer effort and it's, you know, incredible what they have been able to accomplish. And it's like kind of in the constellation of projects. [01:06:20] You know, the additionally, I think these are what you would say and answer in response to this question, I think like the hugging face group is, it's kind of like Google Maps in a way, in the sense that you like, forget how complicated the thing that it's doing is, and I think they have. You see like specific people, I was thinking of STAs STAs, who works on the, works on a lot of the deep speed stuff, just super conscientious and like engaged with the community and like that the entire team at Hugging face is incredible and you know, they, you know, have made a lot of what is happening possible in the industry at large. [01:06:53] And so, um, and I think, yeah, this is like the power of open source ultimately Transformers, library, diffusers, all of it. It's just great. It's a great, it's a delightful product experience. [01:07:03] I think a lot of people, like I had, I once had hugging Face explained to me as Free, get LFS hosting. And I think they've, uh, they've moved beyond that in, in [01:07:11] recent years. [01:07:11] Yeah. A bit. Yeah. It's, it's quite strong work. Yeah. [01:07:14] Yeah. A year from now, what will people be the most surprised by in ai? You already [01:07:19] hinted [01:07:19] at? Uh, yeah, but I think that's not, like, I think that won't be surprising, I think as we're on a ballistic trajectory to having like a, an open lLLaMA reproduction. So here's something I think that will happen that we are not, like socially, we don't have a lot of priors for how to deal with, so this ghost writer track just came out this Kanye West Weekend. [01:07:40] Mm-hmm. AI collaboration. He has thoughts, Drake? Yeah. His thoughts. It's not really, Dave has thoughts. It's not really like, I, I like a different breed of hiphop, but like, it's. For an example of the class, it's like that does sound like a thing I might hear on the radio. So there's a world in, so skip flag was this knowledge graph that's builds itself from your workplace communication. [01:08:02] Think about all of the times that you have expressed your position and intent around a given topic in workplace communication or on the internet at large. I think like character AI is going in this direction where you're going to be able to talk to high fidelity avatars that represent the beliefs and intents of people around you, and that it will be both useful and convincing. [01:08:27] I don't know that like society has good models for how to sort of adapt to that existing and that it will, I suspect just on the basis of like what people are doing. Happened rather quickly at first. [01:08:41] Listen, you can definitely tell it's really good. Mm-hmm. I'm really curious what the long-term results are gonna be, because once you listen it once or twice, you can tell that it's like, it's not really like a coherent song kind of written. [01:08:55] But to me that the funniest thing is that actually, so Drake and the Weekend that never made a song together again because they kinda had a, a follow up between then and, and the Weekend at One song where he said, if you made me then replace me. Because Drake basically hinting that like if he didn't put the weekend on his album, he would've never become popular. [01:09:13] Okay. So it's funny that now there's like this AI generated song from the weekend. It just kind of puts the, you know, if you made me then replace me line in in a different context. But I think this will be super interesting for the labels, you know, like a lot of them do on the Masters to a lot of this music they do on, yeah. [01:09:31] A lot of rides. So, At some point, it's much easier to generate music this way than to do it in person. But I still think you need the artist touch. [01:09:39] Just like what is it that is unique and what, you know. I think artists frequently, you know, I, I know in my own writing and sort of like creative process, you sometimes feel like you're just going through the motions. [01:09:50] And it's funny how we have ways of talking about a phrase rolls off the tongue. That's very much like a causal language model. Mm-hmm. Where like we talk about talk tracks. I have a whole spiel, you know, you talk to a startup founder and you're like, oh my God, how many times have you said like, very close, like very tight variance on this Three minutes sometimes. [01:10:10] That's good. Yeah. It's, it's fine. It's just, it's a thing that we do. And so touching on this idea that like some of what we consider creative acts may not actually be creative acts and sort of, is there a pr, is there a market pressure to favor things that are truly creative versus just like formulaic and like re like rehashing kind of the same essence? [01:10:29] I think like art. Transcends boundaries is often the most interesting art to engage with, where it, it truly does confront you with something you haven't considered before. I hope that that's the place where humans play. And that they're kind of like, oh, I just need some lo-fi study beats. It's like, just gimme an infinite stream. [01:10:49] I'm fine. Because I'm just like, [01:10:52] you've seen that chart of like pop uh, songs, declining interns of the key changes, key changes in [01:10:58] Octa ranges. Completely. Completely. And like, I mean, we used to have [01:11:02] Bohemian Rhapsody and, and [01:11:03] yeah, it's a great example of something that would not be priced appropriately. [01:11:08] This is why I, I think perplexity AI is just very well named because we want more perplexity in our lives. Yes, by the way, shout out for replica ai. I don't know if you've come across them, but Absolutely. They are working on the digital twin stuff. Okay. Ai, uh, request for startups. AI thing you would pay for if someone [01:11:21] built it. [01:11:22] Well, so the LM op stuff for sure. Just like make it easy to generate and evaluate samples using multimodal, multimodal, I mean multiple modalities, not images and texts, but rather like humans, quantitative benchmarks and qualitative Oh, samples that I, I am able to evaluate myself, but other AI startups. I think that we have your sister, your wife, your wife has family that works in the park system. [01:11:49] Mm-hmm. Because it is so everybody has access to effectively the same information about what's interesting in the outdoors. I think you get to a lot of trail heads and you have very, very tight parking lots and it's difficult to get to a lot of these beautiful places. And like, um, mere Woods is another example of like, you gotta reserve a parking spot in the woods that's a plumber. [01:12:12] But I think that the US in particular is so unique in that we have such an expansive public lands, and I think that there are a lot of really majestic and beautiful places in the world that are not written about. And so I think from a geospatial standpoint, you could imagine representing each tile on a map like a word deve. [01:12:39] Embedding where you look at the context in which a location exists and the things people have said about it, and you, you kind of distill the essence of a place and you can given a statement about how I wanna spend my day route traffic more evenly. On the surface of the earth so that we are not all competing for the same fixed pool of resources. [01:13:03] I don't know that that's something really that's monetizable in like a, you know, is this gonna be the next 10 billion business sort of way. But like there's so much public land and there's so many back roads and like the days where I have, you know, rumbling down a dirt road, my brother are just the best days of my life. [01:13:22] And, uh, I want more of those. I want systems that help us live as fully as possible as humans. Yeah, there's definitely [01:13:29] a lot of, you know, you got the. The most popular trails. Everybody wants to be there. Yeah. And then there's the less known ones. And I feel like a lot of people back to the text to back is like, they don't know what they're gonna find, you know? [01:13:41] Mm-hmm. There's not like YouTube reviews of all these trails. Totally. But like you can see it. So I think a way to, to better understand that would be, would be cool. [01:13:49] I mean, just to kind of like riff on this just a little more and we can wrap, like I do think there's a AI technology as a swarm management. [01:13:59] Tool, you know, being able to perceive sensor and camera inputs from multiple different agents in a system. And I think about like ultra low powered gliders as an example of like, I would like to be able to get, I mean, there, there are tools now where you can, uh, for 180 bucks get a satellite to take a da a picture today of like a five by five kilometer area. [01:14:21] I just wanna be able to run recon fleets on the back country and get like up to date trail conditions. I don't know that anybody's gonna make any real money doing this, but if it existed, I would use it. So maybe I should build it maybe. Yeah, exactly. Open source. It's part of Databricks longstanding commitment to open source for diversifying new markets. [01:14:44] Awesome. Mike, it was, it was great [01:14:45] to have you. Oh, this was a, yeah. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

Mike Conover

Co-founder & CEO, Brightwave

BrightwaveDatabricks