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Great work! Thanks for taking the time to build this and open sourcing it. For me, it scratches on a very real itch. I’ve toyed with the idea of a personal AI a

Great work! Thanks for taking the time to build this and open sourcing it. For me, it scratches on a very real itch. I’ve toyed with the idea of a personal AI assistant to act as a second brain, and help me prioritize and remember things with human intuition (“you can’t afford to delay X, do X today and maybe reach out to Z to set the expectations for delaying Y?”). To me, the greatest strength of LLMs is not their knowledge (which is prone to hallucination), but their ability to analyze ambiguous requests with ease and develop a sane action plan - much like a competent human. One a side note: wouldn’t it be significantly cheaper and as effective to use ChatGPT 3.5 by default, and reserve GPT 4 for special tasks with explicit instruction (“Use GPT 4 to…”). For most chats, GPT 4 would be incredibly wasteful (read: expensive). Also - it would be very cool to experiment the use of GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 in the same conversation! GPT 3.5 could leverage the analysis of GPT 4 and act as the primary communication “chatbot” interface for addressing incremental requests.

ratg13 4y ago
>a personal AI assistant to act as a second brain, and help me prioritize and remember things with human intuition Everyone wants this, but this is not the product. The current AI offerings are information in --> information out. It is not meant to keep state long term, and it is not meant to be your friend. It is meant to answer questions with the information available to it. You can even see in the example screenshot they showcase the fact that it is not designed to be asked follow-up questions.
- JanSt 4y ago
  You can use Langchain / Plugins to get around that issue
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  That's just the case for this bot, but is obviously not the case for ChatGPT. I have a long running conversation with ChatGPT that I use to keep track of a verbal to-do list. I tell it my items with categories (e.g. work, personal, etc.) and estimated times, and then it outputs my complete task list, grouped by category. I then just tell it when I add tasks or complete tasks, and it continually keeps track of and outputs my current outstanding task list. I've been using this for weeks now, and since it's all in a single conversation ChatGPT can keep track of the entire state over time. I don't have access to plugins yet but it would be trivial to implement a personal AI assistant with ChatGPT if it could, for example, look up flight times and prices.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Oh dang, that sounds awesome. So a ChatGPT conversation doesn't have a historical limit? I guess I assumed it would start having to forget things at a certain point.
    - hesdeadjim 4y ago
      As far as I’m aware it will definitely forget things as the history grows. You can “remind” it about things to keep them relevant, and I think a cool product built like OP’s project would take that into consideration for long running tasks.
    - zwily 4y ago
      Yes, there’s a limit. Right now it’s 4000 tokens (gpt4 has a 32k model but i don’t think it’s available yet, at least with chatgpt). Once you near the limit, chatgpt will start dropping previous messages to stay under the limit. I don’t know what their algorithm is for deciding what to drop. It could be as simple as dropping the oldest stuff. Or maybe taking a long message and replacing it with a summary. But at a certain point, the conversation becomes “lossy”.
    - rolisz 4y ago
      If it periodically outputs the latest state of the todo list, it won't have the problem of forgetting things from a long time ago.
      - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
        FWIW that's exactly what it does (updates the current state of the whole todo list each time). After two weeks of use I've never had it make a mistake in keeping track of my total list of tasks. By default (I mean I didn't ask it to do this) it outputs the total estimated time for each category of tasks, and that summation has been wrong (which wasn't that surprising to me, as "LLMs aren't great at math" is a known issue), but even then I just tell it "Can you double check the category totals?" and it fixes them.
    - haukurb 4y ago
jbellis 4y ago
GPT4 is so much better than 3.5 at virtually everything that I don't think it's worth trying to figure out which ones 3.5 is almost adequate enough for. Also, the pricing is per token, so even with 4 it is close to negligible unless you are loading in a lot of context or your conversation gets very long.
- literalAardvark 4y ago
  The real problem with 4 is that OpenAI are having trouble keeping up with the demand. So it might not be an option until 4 turbo comes out in 37 hours or whatever their development cycle is these days.
  - hesdeadjim 4y ago
    Yea, I find it a fair bit annoying that I pay $20 and have a 25 message cap every 3 hours.
    - ukuina 4y ago
      I use TypingMind.com and the GPT4 API. Seems an overall better experience.
      - arthurcolle 4y ago
        GPT-4 API still not open. I should really try Evals to get early access, been dying to give it a spin (outside of ChatGPT)
        totoglazer 4y ago
        It works for me.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Because you were one of the blessed lucky ones to get access to GPT-4 API? I'm still on the waitlist :(.
tudorw 4y ago
good point, I'm doing this with chatGPT, I use a long conversation with 3.5 to help me write prompts for 4, it's fun, when I hit the rate cap on 4 I'll go back to 3.5 with what 4 came up with, then converse on the topic until my 4 cap lifts, combine that with being able to ask bing for things like links and current information and dalle for image based visualisations makes for an intriguing combination, bard gets a look in to but so far seems a little shy compared to 4 or bing.

ratg13 4y ago

>a personal AI assistant to act as a second brain, and help me prioritize and remember things with human intuition Everyone wants this, but this is not the product. The current AI offerings are information in --> information out. It is not meant to keep state long term, and it is not meant to be your friend. It is meant to answer questions with the information available to it. You can even see in the example screenshot they showcase the fact that it is not designed to be asked follow-up questions.

JanSt 4y ago
You can use Langchain / Plugins to get around that issue
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
That's just the case for this bot, but is obviously not the case for ChatGPT. I have a long running conversation with ChatGPT that I use to keep track of a verbal to-do list. I tell it my items with categories (e.g. work, personal, etc.) and estimated times, and then it outputs my complete task list, grouped by category. I then just tell it when I add tasks or complete tasks, and it continually keeps track of and outputs my current outstanding task list. I've been using this for weeks now, and since it's all in a single conversation ChatGPT can keep track of the entire state over time. I don't have access to plugins yet but it would be trivial to implement a personal AI assistant with ChatGPT if it could, for example, look up flight times and prices.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Oh dang, that sounds awesome. So a ChatGPT conversation doesn't have a historical limit? I guess I assumed it would start having to forget things at a certain point.
  - hesdeadjim 4y ago
    As far as I’m aware it will definitely forget things as the history grows. You can “remind” it about things to keep them relevant, and I think a cool product built like OP’s project would take that into consideration for long running tasks.
  - zwily 4y ago
    Yes, there’s a limit. Right now it’s 4000 tokens (gpt4 has a 32k model but i don’t think it’s available yet, at least with chatgpt). Once you near the limit, chatgpt will start dropping previous messages to stay under the limit. I don’t know what their algorithm is for deciding what to drop. It could be as simple as dropping the oldest stuff. Or maybe taking a long message and replacing it with a summary. But at a certain point, the conversation becomes “lossy”.
  - rolisz 4y ago
    If it periodically outputs the latest state of the todo list, it won't have the problem of forgetting things from a long time ago.
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      FWIW that's exactly what it does (updates the current state of the whole todo list each time). After two weeks of use I've never had it make a mistake in keeping track of my total list of tasks. By default (I mean I didn't ask it to do this) it outputs the total estimated time for each category of tasks, and that summation has been wrong (which wasn't that surprising to me, as "LLMs aren't great at math" is a known issue), but even then I just tell it "Can you double check the category totals?" and it fixes them.
  - haukurb 4y ago

jbellis 4y ago

GPT4 is so much better than 3.5 at virtually everything that I don't think it's worth trying to figure out which ones 3.5 is almost adequate enough for. Also, the pricing is per token, so even with 4 it is close to negligible unless you are loading in a lot of context or your conversation gets very long.

literalAardvark 4y ago
The real problem with 4 is that OpenAI are having trouble keeping up with the demand. So it might not be an option until 4 turbo comes out in 37 hours or whatever their development cycle is these days.
- hesdeadjim 4y ago
  Yea, I find it a fair bit annoying that I pay $20 and have a 25 message cap every 3 hours.
  - ukuina 4y ago
    I use TypingMind.com and the GPT4 API. Seems an overall better experience.
    - arthurcolle 4y ago
      GPT-4 API still not open. I should really try Evals to get early access, been dying to give it a spin (outside of ChatGPT)
      - totoglazer 4y ago
        It works for me.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Because you were one of the blessed lucky ones to get access to GPT-4 API? I'm still on the waitlist :(.

tudorw 4y ago

good point, I'm doing this with chatGPT, I use a long conversation with 3.5 to help me write prompts for 4, it's fun, when I hit the rate cap on 4 I'll go back to 3.5 with what 4 came up with, then converse on the topic until my 4 cap lifts, combine that with being able to ask bing for things like links and current information and dalle for image based visualisations makes for an intriguing combination, bard gets a look in to but so far seems a little shy compared to 4 or bing.