2024

You're probably not doing experiments right

I recently started working as a research engineer and it's been a significant mindset shift in how I approach my work. it's tricky to run experiments with LLMs efficiently and accurately and after months of trial and error, I've found that there are three key factors that make the biggest difference

1. Being clear about what you're varying
2. Investing time to build out some infrastructure
3. Doing some simple sensitivity analysis

Let's see how each of these can make a difference in your experimental workflow.

Why Instructor might be a better bet than Langchain

Introduction

If you're building LLM applications, a common question is which framework to use: Langchain, Instructor, or something else entirely. I've found that this decision really comes down to a few critical factors to choose the right one for your application. We'll do so in three parts

1. First we'll talk about testing and granular controls and why you should be thinking about it from the start
2. Then we'll explain why you should be evaluating a framework's ability to experiment quickly with different models and prompts and adopt new features quickly.
3. Finally, we'll consider why long term maintenance is also an important factor and why Instructor often provides a balanced solution, offering both simplicity and flexibility.

How does Instructor work?

For Python developers working with large language models (LLMs), instructor has become a popular tool for structured data extraction. While its capabilities may seem complex, the underlying mechanism is surprisingly straightforward. In this article, we'll walk through a high level overview of how the library works and how we support the OpenAI Client.

We'll start by looking at

1. Why should you care about Structured Extraction?
2. What is the high level flow
3. How does a request go from Pydantic Model to Validated Function Call?

By the end of this article, you'll have a good understand of how instructor helps you get validated outputs from your LLM calls and a better understanding of how you might be able to contribute to the library yourself.

Getting Started with Evals - a speedrun through Braintrust

For software engineers struggling with LLM application performance, simple evaluations are your secret weapon. Forget the complexity — we'll show you how to start testing your LLM in just 5 minutes using Braintrust. By the end of this article, you'll have a working example of a test harness that you can easily customise for your own use cases.

We'll be using a cleaned version of the GSM8k dataset that you can find here.

Here's what we'll cover:

1. Setting up Braintrust
2. Writing our first task to evaluate an LLM's response to the GSM8k with Instructor
3. Simple recipes that you'll need

How to create synthetic data that works

Synthetic data can accelerate AI development, but generating high-quality datasets remains challenging. In this article, I'll walk through a few experiments I've done with synthetic data generation and the takeaways I've learnt so that you can do the same.

We'll do by covering

1. Limitations of simple generation methods : Why simple generation methods produce homogeneous data
2. Entropy and why it matters : Techniques to increase diversity in synthetic datasets
3. Practical Implementations : Some simple examples of how to increase entropy and diversity to get better synthetic data

AI Engineering World Fair

What's new?

Last year, we saw a lot of interest in the use of LLMs for new use cases. This year, with more funding and interest in the space, we've finally started thinking about productionizing these models at scale and making sure that they're reliable, consistent and secure.

Let's start with a few definitions

• Agent : This is a LLM which is provided with a few tools it can call. The agentic part of this system comes from the ability to make decisions based on some input. This is similar to Harrison Chase's article here

• Evaluations : A set of metrics that we can look at to understand where our current system falls short. An example could be measuring precision and recall.

• Synthethic Data Generation: Data generated by a LLM which is meant to mimic real data

Grokking LLMs

I've spent the last year working with LLMs and writing a good amount of technical content on how to use them effectively, mostly with the help of structured parsing using a framework like Instructor. Most of what I know now is self-taught and this is the guide that I wish I had when starting out.

It should take about 10-15 minutes at most to read and I've added some resources along the way that are relevant to you. If you're looking for a higher level, i suggest skimming over the first two sections and then focusing more on the application/data side of things!

I hope that after reading this essay, you walk away with an enthusiasm that these models are going to change so much things that we know today. We have models with reasoning abilities and knowledge capacities that dwarf many humans today in tasks such as Mathetical Reasoning, QnA and more.

Introduction

It's really fun to create your own tools. With some extra time on my hands this weekend, I decided to work on building a small tool that would solve a problem i'd been facing for some time - converting wikilinks to relative links.

For those who are unaware, when you work in tools like Obsidian, the default tends to be wikilinks that look like this [[wiki-link]]. This is great if you're only using obsidian but limits the portability of your markdown script itself. For platforms such as Github, the lack of absolute links means that you can't easily click and navigate between markdown files on their web platform.

Writing scripts that scale

Writing good scripts for machine learning is an art. I struggled with writing them for a long time because of how different it was to my experience working with full-stack frameworks such as React or FastAPI.

There were four main issues that I struggled with

1. My job has a high probability of failing without any reason
2. My data might not fit into memory for no reason
3. Running a single job takes days or more
4. Optimizing hyper-parameters is genuinely difficult

Everything I've learnt about writing good Python code

In the past 6 months, I've 10xed the amount of python code I've written. In this article, I'll show you a few easy actionable tips to write better and more maintainable code. I've been lucky enough to have Jason (@jxnlco on twitter) review a good chunk of my code and I've found that these few things have made a massive difference in my code quality.

1. using the @classmethod decorator
2. learn the stdlib
3. write simpler functions
4. being a bit lazier - earn the abstraction
5. decouple your implementation