4 ms·

The amount of Ambiguity in the English language is going to cause all kinds of headaches. Is "Week" Monday to Friday, Sunday to Saturday, Monday to Sunday or s

The amount of Ambiguity in the English language is going to cause all kinds of headaches. Is "Week" Monday to Friday, Sunday to Saturday, Monday to Sunday or some other period. Is "Week-to-date Total" Total Sales (pre or post tax??), Total Customers, Total Inventory or some other total Even "Moving Average" is full of ambiguity is it a Centered Moving Average a Rolling Moving Average, Is it Weighted? To counter all of this ambiguity you are going to have to be extremely precise and explicit about how you phrase things which means the code is going to be extremely verbose.

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
That’s precisely the promise of going down this path. Today you have to be ultra specific and hit go. Maybe tomorrow, you just say what you want and it’s asks you follow up questions like the ones you mentioned.
falcor84 3y ago
But is it actually that different from the current situation? Sometimes you really just want a quick and dirty "moving four week average" for some ad-hoc analysis, and it's ok if it's not perfectly consistent with other analyses. I've seen many such cases of inconsistent definitions in companies, and even in the same team. But then when it does become crucial to be consistent, people usually end up defining something like "acme business week" and use that for the important analyses. And I don't see why we wouldn't just ask the LLM to use such precise definitions as part of the prompt (or even as part of fine tuning).
- bigger_cheese 3y ago
  Usually when you are doing something quick and dirty you at least have an internal understanding of how you are transforming the data and what calculations you are doing. Even if no one else in the company agrees with your method they can at least understand what you did to arrive at the figure and other people can verify your queries/calculations. I'm envisioning the worse case where this is a blackbox that spits out a dataset with no transparency and limited explainability as to how it constructed the query. Maybe it will be better than that but I'm concerned about the implications if it is not.

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago

That’s precisely the promise of going down this path. Today you have to be ultra specific and hit go. Maybe tomorrow, you just say what you want and it’s asks you follow up questions like the ones you mentioned.

falcor84 3y ago

But is it actually that different from the current situation? Sometimes you really just want a quick and dirty "moving four week average" for some ad-hoc analysis, and it's ok if it's not perfectly consistent with other analyses. I've seen many such cases of inconsistent definitions in companies, and even in the same team. But then when it does become crucial to be consistent, people usually end up defining something like "acme business week" and use that for the important analyses. And I don't see why we wouldn't just ask the LLM to use such precise definitions as part of the prompt (or even as part of fine tuning).

bigger_cheese 3y ago
Usually when you are doing something quick and dirty you at least have an internal understanding of how you are transforming the data and what calculations you are doing. Even if no one else in the company agrees with your method they can at least understand what you did to arrive at the figure and other people can verify your queries/calculations. I'm envisioning the worse case where this is a blackbox that spits out a dataset with no transparency and limited explainability as to how it constructed the query. Maybe it will be better than that but I'm concerned about the implications if it is not.