4 ms·

Cool project but why use an LLM for this? Recommendation systems exist well before LLMs and have been in use for a while, wouldn't it better and more efficient

Cool project but why use an LLM for this? Recommendation systems exist well before LLMs and have been in use for a while, wouldn't it better and more efficient even?

fingerthieff 2y ago
yeah I mentioned in another comment I've never found recommendation systems to work very well for me. I've gone through many of them and the reason I decided to start using LLMs was because I was out of options...and after I tried it I ended up much preferring the recommendations given. You can also specify more granular in human words what you're looking for which is a big bonus for me personally.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
All of them sucked, though. Turns out, running regression on some features picked as much to help the user as to satisfy business objectives, doesn't lead to a system that can capture one's preferences well. LLMs have the benefit of understanding (or some values of understanding) how people feel about things in general, in a global sense. They may not have a database of people's choices, but they have a "database" of connotations for every word, how ideas and emotions relate, how interests connect, etc. Instead of relying on a relatively tiny historical record of choices in few, specific (and ill-defined) categories, they can just place user's history in their 10 000 dimensional latent space and use that as a direction to explore, effectively guessing whatever the user's actual preferences are likely to be, without being able to name them or fit into explicit categories.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  The best recommendation system I encountered was the "similar artists" cloud on what.cd on an artists page. Has never failed me. https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/classes/artists_similar.class.php https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/classes/artist...

4 ms·

Cool project but why use an LLM for this? Recommendation systems exist well before LLMs and have been in use for a while, wouldn't it better and more efficient

by silvanocerza 2y ago

Cool project but why use an LLM for this? Recommendation systems exist well before LLMs and have been in use for a while, wouldn't it better and more efficient even?

fingerthieff 2y ago
yeah I mentioned in another comment I've never found recommendation systems to work very well for me. I've gone through many of them and the reason I decided to start using LLMs was because I was out of options...and after I tried it I ended up much preferring the recommendations given. You can also specify more granular in human words what you're looking for which is a big bonus for me personally.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
All of them sucked, though. Turns out, running regression on some features picked as much to help the user as to satisfy business objectives, doesn't lead to a system that can capture one's preferences well. LLMs have the benefit of understanding (or some values of understanding) how people feel about things in general, in a global sense. They may not have a database of people's choices, but they have a "database" of connotations for every word, how ideas and emotions relate, how interests connect, etc. Instead of relying on a relatively tiny historical record of choices in few, specific (and ill-defined) categories, they can just place user's history in their 10 000 dimensional latent space and use that as a direction to explore, effectively guessing whatever the user's actual preferences are likely to be, without being able to name them or fit into explicit categories.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  The best recommendation system I encountered was the "similar artists" cloud on what.cd on an artists page. Has never failed me. https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/classes/artists_similar.class.php https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/classes/artist...