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The place where I work was an early adopter of LLM, having started working on it a year ago. When I build stuff with GPT-3, especially in the earlier days, I g
by ggnore7452 4y ago
The place where I work was an early adopter of LLM, having started working on it a year ago.
When I build stuff with GPT-3, especially in the earlier days, I get the strong impression that it's like we are doing machine learning without Numpy and Pandas.
with LangChain, many of the systems I have built can be done in just one or two lines, making life much easier for rest of us. I also believe that LangChain's Agent framework is underappreciated as it was pretty ahead of its time until the official ChatGPT plugins were released. (contributed to LangChain a bit too.)
Unfortunately, the documentation is lacking indeed. While I understand the need to move quickly, it is not good that some crucial concepts like Customized LLM have inadequate documentation. (Perhaps having some LLM builds on top of the repo would be more effective than documentation at this point.)
- startupsfail 4y agoI think LangChain is already outdated and it (and its copycats) are going to cripple the entire field.
- spacemanspiff01 4y agoWhy? What do you think the better model is?
- cube2222 4y agoCould you expand on what you think is the state of the art and direction we should be heading in?
- startupsfail 4y agoWell, had the community tried analyzing what could be done better? And iterating on the design? No, the design from an old academic paper was used with a much newer model. And now everyone is just copying that. It works, because new models are impressive. But the design is far from being elegant or particularly efficient. And now, because tons of data like that is going to be generated, we’ll be stuck with it.
- cube2222 4y agoI mean, it's based on a paper[0] from November, no? Or is that called "old" in the AI world? [0]: https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/react-synergizing-reasoning-and-acting.html?m=1 https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/11/react-synergizing-reasonin...
- startupsfail 4y agoYes, relatively old. The issue is, this approach is designed to work with the “classical” language model, trained using “The Pile” methods. This particular one was Palm 540b. So essentially you have an approach, designed to work on these models that are not really instruction following models and that truly are stochastic parrots. The models had changed substantially since. But the approach of chaining them in this particular way stuck. And is getting copied everywhere, without much thought.
- siva7 4y agoYour answer doesn't make any sense regarding langchain to be honest.
- startupsfail 4y agoSure. I’m just expressing my opinion that the design is suboptimal and that the level of design is literally “You are GPT-3 and you suck at math” [quote from the LangChain code base]. I don’t want to see further expansion of this. I’m not offering higher level design, because I’m not sure about safety of all of this. But having a poor and potentially unstable design like LangChain also doesn’t contribute to it :-/
- satvikpendem 3y agoSorry to bring up an older thread, but I was looking into LangChain recently, and I was thinking of making something similar but in other languages. Do you have any insight into what direction is better to move in for LangChain-like alternatives?
- intelVISA 4y agoIt is, but it'll still get copious funding and let a few sly engineers escape the Matrix - so what's the harm?
- TrevorJ 4y agoWhere do you see Langchain fitting into the ecosystem once Open AI rolls out plugins more widely?
- passion__desire 4y agoThen we will connect plugins visually as Unreal's Blueprint Visual Scripting allows.
- TrevorJ 4y agoIs this supposition, or actually the direction Langchain is headed?
- ggnore7452 4y agoit still works well with other LLM (like llama and more). various small, open sourced, and verticle LLMs vs one large GPT models would be quite interesting.
- Karrot_Kream 4y agoThe docs are lacking but the underlying code is so simple that it's just a few clicks/rg searches away from figuring out what you need. It's all mostly ways to do string templating. IMO the ergonomics of LangChain need an overhaul; there's too many ways to do the same thing and there's too much type erasure that makes it hard to use strengths in a particular LLM. For example, it's still a pain to distinguish between using a Chat oriented LLM vs a regular completion one. There also seems to be really poor observability in the code and performance seems to be an afterthought. I tell friends who ask about LangChain that it's great to experiment with but not something I'd put into production. Hopefully this funding helps them shore things up.
- thequadehunter 4y agoI was about to rant about the documentation, but I just checked and it seems to have improved a lot.
- lebed2045 4y agoI wonder is it already possible for an AI to write documentation from scratch based of code base?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SheinhardtWigCo 4y agoAre you saying you'd use something else in production? > For example, it's still a pain to distinguish between using a Chat oriented LLM vs a regular completion one. Totally agree. After using it for a few weeks, this is one of the most visible weaknesses in the design.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago> Are you saying you'd use something else in production? Absolutely. The Langchain interface is quite easy to build atop any old LLM, and if you're just using OpenAI then OpenAI already distirbutes clients in a bunch of languages that you can just use. Even then, you're calling a few HTTP endpoints and stuffing some data in a payload. It's really basic stuff. I'd prototype in Langchain, grab the prompts and agents I ended up using, and reimplement them in $MY_PL on $MY_PLATFORM. That's what I find so fun about these LLMs, they're just trivial to use for anyone that can ship text off to an endpoint (whether networked or local) and receive a text response.
- thequadehunter 4y agoIt's unfortunate that prettymuch all shiny AI things have horrible documentation. I see a lot of misinformation in non-researcher AI circles and I feel like it stems from that sometimes.
- o_____________o 4y agoThere are two Javascript alternatives, but how robust the development is remains to be seen: https://github.com/hwchase17/langchainjs https://github.com/hwchase17/langchainjs https://github.com/cfortuner/promptable https://github.com/cfortuner/promptable
- stan_kirdey 4y agoit is ironic that documentation is lacking when it can be generated with an LLM, using LangChain itself
- mpaepper 4y agoI agree that the agents are underappreciated. To make them more accessible I rewrote them in ~200 lines of code, so you can easily understand how it works. They have access to a python console, Google search and hacker news search: https://github.com/mpaepper/llm_agents https://github.com/mpaepper/llm_agents
- paulgb 4y agoIn case anyone misses it buried in the readme, your accompanying blog post looks like the solid introduction to the subject that I've been looking for: https://www.paepper.com/blog/posts/intelligent-agents-guided-by-llms/ https://www.paepper.com/blog/posts/intelligent-agents-guided...
- jason-phillips 4y agoI was looking through Langchain's docs and code last weekend. I'm surprised how well it is documented, actually. I thought it was fairly feature rich vis-a-vis potential chaining opportunities, but with obvious room to grow. Quite impressive, all things considered. Excited to see what happens going forward.