Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / Making AI Reliable is the Greatest Challenge of the 2020s // Alon Bochman // #312
Transcript
- 0:00So it's Alan Bachman. I'm the CEO of Rag Metrics.
- 0:05Our website is Rag Metrics dot AI and I don't drink coffee.
- 0:10Demetrius I I'm sugar is my is my vice.
- 0:15We talk deeply about how to bring the subject matter experts
- 0:19into this eval life cycle, if you can call it that.
- 0:25We also talk deeply about evals. As you could guess since we were
- 0:30on the topic, he is doing some great stuff at Rag Metrics on
- 0:34LLM as a judge. Let's get into it and a huge
- 0:37shout out to the Rag Metrics team for sponsoring this
- 0:40episode. Dude, I just want to jump right
- 0:49into it because you said something when we were just
- 0:52talking before I hit record and it was all around testing each
- 0:57piece of the entire system. And I am always fascinated by
- 1:03that because there are so many different pieces that you can be
- 1:09testing and you can be looking at.
- 1:11And I know that a lot of folks are trying to go about this.
- 1:15You had mentioned a, do you want to try and use big chunks or
- 1:19smaller chunks? Do you want to try and use one
- 1:21agent or 10 agents? And so there's all this
- 1:25complexity that comes into the field and especially when we
- 1:29start having more and more agents involved, how are you
- 1:33looking at that? How do you see that and how do
- 1:37you think about testing all of that?
- 1:41Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, it's let me
- 1:45just talk about the approach a little bit because I think that
- 1:48a lot of engineers out there are, you know, we're all new to
- 1:55this thing. And so it's natural when you're
- 1:57new to something to just kind of take somebody's word for it.
- 2:00So we read what, you know, maybe what the big labs have to say
- 2:04about how to prompt our models, or we read what the, what the
- 2:08vector database vendors have to say about how to set up, you
- 2:12know, vectors. Or we read, you know, and then
- 2:14there's maybe like a YouTube influencer that has like an
- 2:18idea. So, you know, if they're
- 2:19popular, if they're charismatic, then we listen to what they have
- 2:22to say. And that's all fine.
- 2:24Like you, you know, we should listen to everybody.
- 2:26But you probably didn't get into engineering just to like take
- 2:31other people's word for it. You probably get into it because
- 2:33you enjoy building, you want to see it for yourself.
- 2:36And this is an amazing opportunity to do that.
- 2:38Like amazing. Because let me tell you,
- 2:41Demetrius, nobody knows what's going to work for your task.
- 2:44Like definitely not me, but definitely not like open AI
- 2:47Anthropic. They don't know, you know, we
- 2:50V8, they don't know. Like nobody knows.
- 2:52We're inventing this as we go. And that is awesome because if
- 2:55you get into the mindset of I'm going to follow what the data
- 3:00tells me, then you will come up with some amazing solutions.
- 3:05And that is how like every magical product that we hear
- 3:10about that I know of when you know, I, I haven't spoken with
- 3:13all the teams that are building magical products.
- 3:15But like every, every time there's a magical product, there
- 3:19is a data-driven process behind it where the team that's
- 3:22building it is not taking anybody's word for it.
- 3:24They're actually like trying out the different models, trying out
- 3:27different prompts, trying out like different configurations of
- 3:30an agent. And sure like you don't, you
- 3:34can't try everything you definitely had.
- 3:36You know, you can't just shut the world out.
- 3:39You you have to learn, you have to build on the shoulders of
- 3:42giants, but you have to build like, and it's it's awesome.
- 3:46It's an awesome privilege to build like it's you'd be super
- 3:48boring if we figured it all out. We probably all move on to some
- 3:52other place. So so this is like this is the
- 3:55good part. Yeah, there would be a lot less
- 3:58hype influencers if it was all figured out already.
- 4:00That's right. You know, I think that let let's
- 4:04take like AI don't know, take a ragpipe, a typical rag
- 4:07application that you're building.
- 4:08So if you are following sort of this like empirical philosophy,
- 4:15it you'd probably set up something that is pretty common,
- 4:19right? Maybe you'd set up the easiest
- 4:20one. So you have you take the most
- 4:22popular model, take the most popular vector database.
- 4:25Maybe you have like 1 prompt, 1 task.
- 4:28And then you think through sort of what, what do you want out of
- 4:32that step in the process? Like what outcome are you
- 4:36looking for? Regardless of what technology
- 4:38you use, think about like, what does it mean to generate value
- 4:42from this? What are your users like?
- 4:44What are your requirements? And then in my opinion, you set
- 4:49up an evaluation. All an evaluation is is, you
- 4:52know, you set up a couple of examples.
- 4:54If a user asks me this, this is what I want out, this is what I
- 4:57don't want out. And you come up with like it
- 5:00doesn't have to be a massive amount, could be like 30-40 of
- 5:03them. Like it's totally possible to
- 5:04write out an e-mail in a couple of hours.
- 5:07It's not like a major project, but it is a major sort of
- 5:13journey of self discovery because you're thinking through
- 5:15like what you want. You're thinking through what you
- 5:17want. It's a way of taking what you
- 5:20want from your head and putting it on a piece of paper.
- 5:23It's not unlike writing a requirements document, but it's
- 5:25like requirements for AI. And, and then you have this,
- 5:29this Greek, Now you have a benchmark and you can actually
- 5:32benchmark like different models can give you really different
- 5:36results. You'd be surprised and opening
- 5:39Eye and Anthropic and Mistral, they have no clue which of their
- 5:42models is going to be the best one for your.
- 5:44I assure you they don't know. Nobody will know until until you
- 5:49run this benchmark on your task. And the same thing with like all
- 5:52the other pieces of the of the pipeline.
- 5:55Yeah, the the funny piece is you have that trial and error and
- 6:01you have to test it out and see in a way, like how few examples
- 6:09can you give to get a bit of a signal and at least know
- 6:14directionally we're going the right way.
- 6:19But then later to get that last 10%, it is just mayhem.
- 6:25And that's why I think it's fascinating tracking all of the
- 6:29changes across the whole life cycle.
- 6:32And it reminds me a little bit of Jupiter notebooks and how you
- 6:39are, you know, you have final dot whatever I pop and and here
- 6:45it's in a way that exploration is happening just like you were
- 6:52doing this data exploration back in the day.
- 6:55And so now you're trying to track it and you want to know
- 6:58each little thing that's changed and you want to see against the
- 7:02eval set. How are we doing here?
- 7:06Right. I think it's not unlike building
- 7:09code, right? You, you start with you just
- 7:11start with a happy path. Probably.
- 7:13Maybe you're starting with a demo and it's like famously easy
- 7:16to make a demo with AI, right? Because it says some crazy
- 7:19stuff. You try enough things, it's
- 7:21going to say something amazing. If you just show that like you
- 7:24don't show any of the other stuff, you're going to look
- 7:26fantastic. It's not hard to do, right?
- 7:28So you make a demo, maybe you get a little bit of buying, you
- 7:31get a little bit of support, maybe some resources, and then
- 7:35you have the next step, which, you know, maybe you know, some
- 7:38people call it hill climbing, but it's just like, you know,
- 7:41instead of just one happy path, maybe you come up with like 10
- 7:44or 20 happy path. So whatever it is that your chap
- 7:48out or copilot or AI step is supposed to handle, just think
- 7:52of a couple different examples. So it's not just one path.
- 7:54And that's usually also fairly easy.
- 7:57It's not as easy as the demo, but it's really not hard.
- 7:59You're just thinking through a couple of different, you know,
- 8:01examples and then like you said, like it gets bigger.
- 8:06Hopefully, you know, maybe you, you have a second, then we have
- 8:09a bit more buying. Eventually you let users in.
- 8:13When you let users in, it's just it's going to hit the fan.
- 8:16It's going to hit the fan in the most amazing, beautiful way
- 8:20because they will put stuff in there that you just would not
- 8:24imagine in a million years. Like I, you know, you, you
- 8:26always know like the guy who was like when testing software
- 8:30became like a popular thing, there was this guy was like, I
- 8:32don't even know automated testing tools.
- 8:34You just bang his head, bang his fingers on the keyboard, all
- 8:37like 7 keys at once and it would break like a lot of software
- 8:40that way. I'm talking about like 20-30
- 8:43years ago, like that was a really good way to test
- 8:45software. You just bang the keyboard.
- 8:47Well, that's what users do. Like they will really bang up
- 8:49your bot in a way that you just like never imagined.
- 8:53And it gives you the scope to just like make it a lot better.
- 8:57And it's like you said, you know, the challenge is that it's
- 9:01very easy for, for an engineer to focus on the, the edge case
- 9:08that you're fixing and like break a whole bunch of other
- 9:11ones because you don't, you don't know that you broke them.
- 9:13You just change the prompt. The prompt used to work for 20
- 9:16cases. You're focused on case number
- 9:1921. You're working really, really
- 9:20hard on it. It's not easy to get like
- 9:22shoehorn AI to do what you want on case 21 and you finally get
- 9:26case 21 working. Yay.
- 9:28Oh my God, cases one through 5 just broke.
- 9:30You have no idea until the next user comes in tries that.
- 9:34So like to me, the solution for that is to build up that, build
- 9:41up that eval. So every time that you run an
- 9:43eval, don't just run it on case number 21, run it on all the
- 9:47cases. And then if you broke something,
- 9:49you will at least know right away.
- 9:51That's kind of like the first step to fixing the problem is
- 9:55knowing the problem. How many evals are enough?
- 10:03That is a bit like how long is a piece of string.
- 10:05It depends on, you know, it depends on what you're building.
- 10:08I mean, if you're building a, you know, I don't know, an
- 10:13entertainment application poetry generator, probably fewer than
- 10:19if you're building like, I don't know, a government service.
- 10:23Depends on the stakes, depends on the breadth of like
- 10:26functionality in general. I would say like the maybe the
- 10:29short answer is it's, it's a dialogue with your users, right?
- 10:35So it you want as few evals as necessary to keep your users
- 10:40happy. And the longer the thing works,
- 10:43like the more feedback you get from users.
- 10:45So it tends to expand. It's like scope creep, right?
- 10:48It tends to users ask for more stuff.
- 10:50So it expands the functionality. And as you get more functions,
- 10:54you, you know, you add your evals.
- 10:56But another way to think about it, in my opinion, sorry, long
- 10:59answer for a short question, but like, OK, let's let's say that
- 11:03you're, let's say that you're comfortable with automating
- 11:07testing for regular software. Let's let's park AI for the
- 11:10moment. And somebody were to ask you
- 11:12like, how many tests are, how many tests do you need for to,
- 11:16to like in your test harness? You probably say, well, I have
- 11:20some intuition because I have some idea about how complicated
- 11:23the code is, how many different code paths it needs to go
- 11:26through. But I'm also not so like literal
- 11:30and and I'm not such a novice that I have to get 100%
- 11:36coverage. Like it's not about checking the
- 11:38box. There are some paths that are
- 11:40more important than others. And so as a good software
- 11:43engineer, I'm going to make the trade off.
- 11:45I'm going to try to figure out the, I have an idea of what's
- 11:48most likely to break. What's the critical path that is
- 11:52like right on the edge of working.
- 11:54It's not so easy with something. If I mess up a little bit, it's
- 11:57going to break. And I have like, they're kind of
- 11:59like veins going through the body.
- 12:01Like I, I can trace them because I, I built the thing.
- 12:04And if I, if I can only write like 34510 tests, I know where,
- 12:09which one, which are the critical cases that I need to
- 12:11cover. I think it's the same kind of
- 12:13intuition when you're building evals for for an AI system.
- 12:18Until you give it to the users and they teach you.
- 12:20Until that's right and they realize I go, no, like, what if
- 12:24I what if I ask it to, you know, play chopsticks?
- 12:28So yeah, well, I guess another way of phrasing the question is
- 12:33can you ever have too many evals?
- 12:38I think you can. So first of all, I think that
- 12:40evals can be redundant in the same way that automated tests of
- 12:44non EI systems can be redundant. You can have this false sense of
- 12:49security if you've got, you know, 1000 tests, but they're
- 12:53all like really testing the same like 10 paths to your code.
- 12:56First of all, you're spending a lot of extra time that you don't
- 12:58need to to get through a test harness.
- 13:01And just because you have that high count should not make you
- 13:04extra confident because you're not actually testing breath.
- 13:07So in the same way you can have redundant evals that are not
- 13:11actually going deep enough and testing the edge cases that your
- 13:14users care about. So that's one way of of too
- 13:18many. Another way of too many is you
- 13:22think of emails are kind of more interesting than regular tests
- 13:26in my opinion, because they, you know, in the same way that you
- 13:29you use rag because you can't jam everything into the prompt,
- 13:33right? If we can jam everything into
- 13:35the prompt, we wouldn't need RAG, but it's expensive and
- 13:37needle in a stag and all that stuff.
- 13:39So we use Rag to kind of expand the memory or the mind of the
- 13:43model in the same way I think evals are expanding the
- 13:47knowledge base or the area of responsibility of the model.
- 13:52And just like with any kind of learning process, you want to
- 13:56have a healthy intake that takes in like new cases and you also
- 14:01want to be able to forget things that are like you need a clean
- 14:05up. So like, maybe some evals are no
- 14:07longer relevant. The facts have changed, the law
- 14:10has changed, your users have changed, the applications
- 14:13change, right? It's a new year, crazy things
- 14:15are happening. Some things that we believed are
- 14:18no longer true. We need to update our view of
- 14:20the world. So to the extent that evals are
- 14:24a shorthand for your view of the world, you need to have like,
- 14:28just a, like a healthy digestion, digestion system,
- 14:31stuff comes in, stuff comes out. Is that just every quarter or
- 14:38year or half year you're going through the evals and you're
- 14:42checking them? So you definitely need a cleanup
- 14:46stage and the frequency of that stage, you know, it depends on
- 14:50how fast moving your industry is, right?
- 14:52So if you're doing constitutional law, right, it's
- 14:57probably going to be really slow moving.
- 14:59If you're doing, I don't know, like news, then you know, yeah,
- 15:03you're going to, you're going to need to clean it up a little, a
- 15:06little faster. And you don't want to evaluate
- 15:10current events based on stuff that happened like 10 years ago
- 15:14unnecessarily. So yeah, it's basically like a,
- 15:19it's a like an update speed. And it depends on how volatile
- 15:22and fresh your knowledge needs to be in my opinion.
- 15:25I like that visual too of the trash collector, the garbage
- 15:28collector you come through and you also need to remember to
- 15:32have the trash collector for your evals.
- 15:35Otherwise you could potentially be spending money where you
- 15:38don't need to. Here's another way to think
- 15:40about it. Think about if you're, you know,
- 15:42if you're planning out a product you're writing out, you know,
- 15:45let's say you, you want to communicate with a team that's
- 15:47going to build this product for you.
- 15:49You want to write a requirements document.
- 15:52Now you could think of, there's many ways to go wrong when
- 15:57you're writing a requirements document.
- 15:58You could go to detailed like if you write a requirements
- 16:01document that is super, super detailed.
- 16:03First of all, it's kind of obnoxious for the engineers that
- 16:06are working on it because you're specifying things that are
- 16:08really like probably they know better than you.
- 16:11They could probably, if you empower them, they could
- 16:14probably make better decisions than if you just like spell out
- 16:18like old and how the coach be organized and stuff like that.
- 16:21You can also go like not the but most of the problem.
- 16:24That's usually not the problem. Usually the problem is it's not
- 16:27detailed enough. And then there's a lot of
- 16:28misunderstanding. An engineer thought that you
- 16:31meant something, you meant something else, used shorthand,
- 16:34they misinterpreted it and they build something that doesn't
- 16:37work the way the customer wants. Like that kind of error, the non
- 16:40detailed enough error in my in my career has been like a lot
- 16:44more frequent than the too detailed error.
- 16:46And I think that when you're communicating with AI through
- 16:48evals, the overwhelming risk is not enough.
- 16:52Like I think it is possible to have too many, but you know, if
- 16:56we look at 8020, you know more, more than that, like 99.1 are
- 17:01not enough. 99% of the teams that I know don't have enough
- 17:05evals. Let's talk about handcrafted
- 17:09evals versus the evals that you just ask in LLM to generate for
- 17:16you. How do you view those and the
- 17:18difference is there? So first of all, like it's a
- 17:20matter of cost, right? So it's.
- 17:22So let's, let's put that in the context of what stage you're in,
- 17:26in the project. So maybe, and we talked about
- 17:31some of those stages earlier, right?
- 17:32In the beginning, you just have the one happy path, you've got a
- 17:34demo and then you've got maybe like a little plant.
- 17:38It's, I don't know, it's like a couple of weeks old, got a
- 17:41couple of leaves and then you got this whole like tree and it
- 17:44gets bigger and bigger, right? So in the beginning, when it
- 17:47you're just working on the happy path, you probably don't need a
- 17:51ton of evals and it's probably fine.
- 17:53You know, when you're starting your evals, it's probably fine
- 17:55to have them synthetically generated.
- 17:57You want, you just want to move quickly, like you don't want to
- 18:00wait for other people. And it's not so, so critical
- 18:03that each one of them be letter perfect.
- 18:05You're just trying to grow the surface area quickly so that you
- 18:10get feedback faster so that you can adjust faster.
- 18:13It's like a learning exercise. So the faster the better.
- 18:17Over time, as you get exposed to more users, synthetic in my
- 18:22opinion loses some value because you have it.
- 18:26It becomes more important to cover the edge cases and there's
- 18:29more of them, and you have access to user data.
- 18:33And when you have access to user data, it's usually better than
- 18:36synthetic. Now you could still get some
- 18:38help in my opinion, like just processing the user data into
- 18:42something useful. It's just a slightly different,
- 18:45I don't know what the right label for is.
- 18:47You're not asking a model to generate from scratch, which is
- 18:50what I think of as synthetic evals, But you're, you could be
- 18:53asking the model to say, OK, help me scan through this like
- 18:57massive ocean of stuff that the model said to people.
- 19:01And I want to, I want to boil it down into the ingredients, like,
- 19:07you know, take the soup and I want to get the ingredients out
- 19:09of the soup. I just want like, give me the
- 19:11carrot, give me the celery, give me the Brussels sprout.
- 19:14And I'm meaning that I want like a few examples that are
- 19:18different from each other. They're all orthogonal and
- 19:20together they collectively will give me the same flavor as the
- 19:24soup. And then you end up with so AI
- 19:27can actually help you with that can help you boil down this like
- 19:30massive log file into themes, groups and and then like kind of
- 19:36reduce them so that you have like a a few examples to work
- 19:40with, but it's different than generating it synthetically.
- 19:43Yeah. And and probably also, I've
- 19:46never tried this, but it makes me think about it as you're
- 19:49saying it, recognizing where we have less evals, where we're a
- 19:56little skimp on the evals. And can you just help us augment
- 20:01that from because we have a few users that have gone down this
- 20:04path, but we don't have a very robust eval set in that regard.
- 20:09So let's augment it with a few examples from the LLM.
- 20:14Yeah, absolutely. So AI can be like a sparring
- 20:17partner when it comes to growing your evals.
- 20:19Exactly like you said, maybe maybe you noticed a couple of
- 20:23failures in a particular area that your eval is supposed to
- 20:27do, but there's only been a few user inputs.
- 20:29But you're anxious about it because you know how The thing
- 20:33is built and you feel like there's going to be more and I'm
- 20:37just not ready. And so AI could be a really nice
- 20:40safe a sparring partner that could just elaborate on those
- 20:44examples, come up with Harvard ones.
- 20:47And it's set up, it's, it can set up this sort of dialectic,
- 20:50right answer, you know, help me ask some questions that are
- 20:54going to be hard for me to answer.
- 20:57Well, it it brings up this topic that we were also talking about
- 21:01before we hit record, which was how can you loop in the subject
- 21:05matter experts, especially the non-technical stakeholders to
- 21:11craft better evals to create a much more robust system.
- 21:16Totally. So let me just maybe set up,
- 21:20this is my understanding of the status quo.
- 21:22This is how I think things work today.
- 21:25Most teams don't test in my, in my experience, they just don't
- 21:28test. So like if they even just even
- 21:31tune into this conversation, listen to like 2 minutes of it.
- 21:34Thank you. Just thank you for that.
- 21:36Appreciate it. Hopefully they get a ton of
- 21:38value from just just set up the first eval with 30 examples.
- 21:42Amazing. That would be a win.
- 21:43But like the teams that do test, they get into these ruts where
- 21:49on the one hand, you know, maybe they generate the data
- 21:53synthetically. Usually the people that know the
- 21:56synthetic tools are the engineers.
- 21:57They don't have the domain expertise.
- 21:59And so if they show the synthetic data to the domain
- 22:01experts, the domain expert looks at that and it looks like a
- 22:05fifth grader did that. Like they don't to them, it
- 22:08looks like you don't even know what you're talking.
- 22:10I can't understand what this is like.
- 22:12You're asking me questions about the, the footer and like what?
- 22:16And so, so it, it makes engagement hard for the domain
- 22:21experts. On the other hand, you know, if
- 22:24an engineering team asks, the domain experts say, hey, can you
- 22:26help us with an eval? Of course, she's like, what the
- 22:28heck's an eval? Like that is not the word that
- 22:31they use. So that hurts engagement.
- 22:34If you are able to have an hour with them and you show them what
- 22:36an eval is and you show them the spreadsheet, then it's a blank
- 22:39page problem because like nobody wants to start with a blank
- 22:42page. The columns are a little
- 22:44unclear. It's very difficult to get
- 22:46domain experts to start like ready writing these evals.
- 22:51So the way that the way that we think about it is it's more
- 22:55about creating a learning loop, a feedback loop.
- 23:00And the feedback loop should be that you have an LM judge that
- 23:06evaluates what the application does.
- 23:10That's that's the typical LM judge.
- 23:12But then you also have a human being that potentially evaluates
- 23:16what the application does. And that human being can either
- 23:18be the user or it could be the domain expert.
- 23:22It's up to them like how much they engage.
- 23:25But it's really, really important to have the LM judge
- 23:28scores alongside the human scores.
- 23:31So you have, let's say the, you know, the user asked X, the
- 23:36model said Y, and then, and then the user said, you know, Y is
- 23:39not correct. I actually want Y prime.
- 23:42And the domain expert said Y is not correct.
- 23:45I actually want Y double prime. So it's really important to have
- 23:49Y prime and Y double prime like on the same screen, so you can
- 23:52compare what the model said, what the user wanted, what the
- 23:56domain expert wanted, and they can review each other.
- 24:00That's what makes, in my opinion, the feedback loop
- 24:03really powerful. What does it mean to review each
- 24:05other? So the domain expert sees what
- 24:08the LLM judge said and gives feedback to the LLM judge to
- 24:13make the LLM judge better. So, you know, hey LM judge, you
- 24:17keep focusing on the footer, but really you should be focusing on
- 24:20what's between the header and the footer because that's like
- 24:23the part of the document that we lawyers care about.
- 24:25Or, you know, hey LM judge, you keep picking on my spelling, but
- 24:29just ignore my spelling and focus on the math, whatever it
- 24:33is, whatever is the right thing for your application.
- 24:36And so the feedback from the domain expert to the LM judge
- 24:40can make the LM judge a better stand in for the domain expert
- 24:45the next time around. And that kind of standing
- 24:47quality, there's a statistical definition for that.
- 24:50So you basically can, you can measure the correlation between
- 24:53LLM judge decisions and domain expert decisions.
- 24:57And the higher that correlation goes, the happier everybody,
- 25:00everybody gets who domain expert trusts the LM judge more.
- 25:03The LM judge is a lot more scalable and good things happen
- 25:07at the same time. Domain experts need the LM judge
- 25:10because sometimes the LM judge can notice things that just as
- 25:15human beings would just don't have like the bam, because like
- 25:18maybe there is an error in the footer.
- 25:20Like do you actually look at the footer?
- 25:22Like maybe it's got the wrong ear in there?
- 25:24I don't know. Like you have all these websites
- 25:26that say copyright like 2022. It looks terrible because nobody
- 25:29looks at the footer. So my point is like, sometimes
- 25:32the LM judge can notice things that as human beings, like, Oh
- 25:35my God, there's just like, I just don't have, I don't have
- 25:38the, there's not enough years until the death of the universe
- 25:42when we look at that. So, so the LM judge actually
- 25:48makes the domain expert better at their job too, because
- 25:50they're noticing that. And they say like, you know
- 25:52what, yeah, you should keep that.
- 25:54So that feedback loop makes the LM judge better and makes the
- 25:59domain expert better. And the fact that they review
- 26:01each other improves the chance that your domain expert will
- 26:05actually engage because they're getting feedback now instead of
- 26:08a blank page, they they give a thumbs up, thumbs down, they
- 26:11explain why. And the net effect, in my
- 26:14opinion, is that this is really like, it's a way of sucking in
- 26:20domain expertise into your application.
- 26:23And there's not a lot of other ways for it to get there.
- 26:26If you think about it like all of these, like the AI labs are
- 26:30solving for, for general intelligence, right?
- 26:33They want to make the best model.
- 26:35So they use general benchmark benchmarks like, you know, MMLU
- 26:39and theoretical math and physics.
- 26:41And you know, when we're building stuff for customers
- 26:44like who care less about how well it does and theoretical
- 26:47does, it just doesn't matter. So you need to know like, I
- 26:50don't know the last out that you built, you know, you need to
- 26:54know how it's, you know, whether it's extracting the right bits
- 26:58from an earnings release or whether it is being rude to a
- 27:01customer or not, or whether it's using the up to
- 27:16So when you, when you're building one of those, the value
- 27:22that you build over time is going to be proportional to how
- 27:26much domain expertise you can bring into your, into your bot.
- 27:30And the domain expertise is going to come from your domain
- 27:32experts, your application, your knowledge, your inside, inside
- 27:37out view. And it's going to be different
- 27:39from mine, even if we're in the same niche.
- 27:42Like we might both be writing financial parsers, but you've
- 27:46got a different view on, you've got a contrarian finance view
- 27:50and that, you know, that's why you have alpha.
- 27:53So when I'm building mine, like I can't just copy yours.
- 27:57First of all, I don't know yours.
- 27:58It's private to you. Secondly, like my customers are
- 28:03looking for something different. Like there's a, there's a reason
- 28:05why your company exists and why my company exists.
- 28:08And we're, we have like different business philosophies.
- 28:10That's why we're different companies.
- 28:12And so it's a beautiful thing. So this spurs a whole load of
- 28:18questions. I want to start with, yeah.
- 28:19Are you just when the expert is having that exchange with the
- 28:25LLM judge, are you updating the prompt every time?
- 28:30How are you making sure that the judge then is able to solidify
- 28:34that and do it every time? Yeah, there's a couple different
- 28:38update mechanisms. Let's let me go through the the
- 28:42easiest one, the easiest 1 is just with fine tuning.
- 28:45It's really it's like that simple.
- 28:47So every time that and domain expert reviews what an LM judge
- 28:53said and says, actually you're wrong about this part, it should
- 28:57be that part, you can construct a better LM judge response based
- 29:02on taking the domain expert view and the original and combining
- 29:06them into like an improved like what what I wish the LM judge
- 29:11response would have been, now that I know what the domain
- 29:13expert thought about it. And so that becomes a question
- 29:17an input output pair. And if you've collected, let's
- 29:21say even like 50 to 100 of those and put up with pairs, you can
- 29:24fine tune the model that you use for the Ellen Judge and it gets
- 29:29better, like it gets better and better and better.
- 29:31That's the simplest update mechanism.
- 29:34You can of course also update the prompt of the Ellen Judge.
- 29:38I think that it's, it's a little bit quicker maybe than fine
- 29:41tuning, but it can get bristly, it can get, it can get brittle
- 29:46over time because, you know, the bigger the prompt gets, the
- 29:49slower the judge gets. And eventually you end up with
- 29:51like this sea of edge cases and nobody, everybody gets scared to
- 29:55update that prompt. So, you know, I think it's
- 29:57really good for the early stages when you just have a few use
- 30:01cases, but over time you probably want to switch to fine
- 30:05tuning. Fascinating.
- 30:07Now the other question that came up right away was when you have
- 30:13different subject matter experts, how do you normalize
- 30:18all of the feedback? Oh, that's amazing.
- 30:20That's I'm so glad about I had this problem.
- 30:22So I was I was head of AI for this company called FactSet.
- 30:26And let me just give you this example.
- 30:28So FactSet is it sells financial data like Bloomberg.
- 30:32You've heard of Bloomberg. Imagine you're a financial
- 30:35analyst, you're building Excel spreadsheet and it's a financial
- 30:38model of a company. So you're, you want, you don't
- 30:40want to hard code the sales and the income, you just want to
- 30:43pull in like the last five quarters.
- 30:46And this way you could just hit refresh and it pulls that.
- 30:48So, so there's like an Excel formula you'll put into some
- 30:51cell to pull in the revenue and a different one to pull in the
- 30:54EPS and a different one to put in the expenses.
- 30:57And after building this Excel language for 40 years, you end
- 31:02up with half a million formulas, half a million formulas.
- 31:05And like absolutely nobody knows them, nobody can even remember
- 31:11them. Nobody can remember what they're
- 31:12called. So OK, so then users start
- 31:15calling and say, like, what's the formula for EPS?
- 31:18The manual is giant and out of date and they can't.
- 31:20And like, and more and more users call.
- 31:25So like 2/3 of the calls are from users just asking like,
- 31:28what's the formula for X? It's a super annoying, you know,
- 31:31thing for you to answer because it's a it's a really, it's just
- 31:34like a look up answer, but there's just a huge volume of
- 31:37users asking because you know, nobody.
- 31:40The manuals can't keep up with half a million formulas.
- 31:44So then it's not so easy to answer because there are nuances
- 31:48like if I ask you, what's the formula for cash, I might mean
- 31:53cash in the bank, or I might mean cash and marketable
- 31:57securities like a short term debt.
- 32:00And it's arguable which one. I mean, cash is kind of like a
- 32:04Gray area word. Some analysts interpret it one
- 32:07way, some interpret the other way.
- 32:09So when we wanted to build a copilot for this, we were like
- 32:13really, really excited about, about it.
- 32:16And the domain experts told us like, you know nothing about
- 32:19finance. And so how are you going to
- 32:20build a Covilot or like, we got this.
- 32:23So, so we built it and we, we very quickly got up to like 70%
- 32:29accuracy and we were feeling like Rockstars, Demetrius
- 32:32Rockstars. And then but, but the domain
- 32:36expert basically said, look, we're not going to let your bot
- 32:39talk to actual people because it could mess up.
- 32:41Like we cannot have the Russell, we're going to have a human in
- 32:44the loop and the humans going to look at what your bot says and
- 32:46they're either going to accept it or reject and you'll know.
- 32:49And they kept rejecting the cash question.
- 32:51Like it kept, you know, we kept getting it wrong.
- 32:54And then when we looked at the data, we realized that it was
- 32:57like, it was like an edit war in Wikipedia where you have like 2
- 33:01people that are not talking to each other, but they're sure
- 33:05that they're right about what cash means.
- 33:07And they keep overriding each other's edit.
- 33:09So no matter how we update the prompt, it's never right.
- 33:13And it just keeps like the bit keeps flipping.
- 33:15Oh, cash means this. Oh, no, cash means that, oh, you
- 33:18know, my, my, my mother, my sister, my mother and sister.
- 33:21So it's like, you know, it's like you cannot, This is why I
- 33:25like, we cannot get above 70% accuracy.
- 33:27And I realized that 70% is the threshold at which people agree
- 33:32with each other. And 30% is actually the area
- 33:36that's actually the Gray area in the system.
- 33:39And this is amazing opportunity because these people, the agents
- 33:42that are actually answering these questions for people, they
- 33:44didn't know that there was a 30% area of it, that they thought
- 33:47that it was just all black and white.
- 33:50It's like in Excel formula, there's a right one and there's
- 33:52a wrong one. But it turns out that we have a
- 33:55unique ability to organized this knowledge base better than it
- 34:00was before the copilot started. So to come back to like machine
- 34:04learning terms and like the nitty gritty, we did a cluster
- 34:08analysis where we embedded the questions and we identified
- 34:13clusters of similar questions, semantically similar that had
- 34:17opposite answers. And that's how we were able to
- 34:19find this like all of these people are asking, you know,
- 34:23where's where's cash? What's the formula for cash?
- 34:26Tell me cash, I want cash or not that you not.
- 34:29Or sometimes they don't use the word cash, but they use a close
- 34:32synonym for cash. And all of those questions got
- 34:34grouped together purely through semantic clustering through the
- 34:38embedding model. And then we basically say, OK,
- 34:41the clusters that have consistent answers, I don't care
- 34:44about those. Those are good soft check.
- 34:46I want the clusters where it's a cluster fuck, right?
- 34:50I want like, I want the clusters where it's like all different
- 34:53answer. They're all over the, the
- 34:54questions seem identical and the answers seem all over the place,
- 34:57right? How could that be?
- 34:58And then, you know, so we, we, but the beauty part is we could
- 35:02identify those automatically. We didn't know the right answer
- 35:05automatically, but we could identify disagreements between
- 35:09domain experts automatically. And this was hugely value added
- 35:12because they didn't have a process for finding those
- 35:15before. And then it's just a matter of
- 35:18you, like, basically getting the two sides engaged.
- 35:22Like, how do you solve the Wikipedia edit war?
- 35:24You get the two people in the room and they start to talk to
- 35:27each other and like, hopefully one convinces the other.
- 35:29And then, you know, then the edit war settled.
- 35:32So we kind of did that. There's like a little bit of
- 35:34plumbing. There's a little bit of
- 35:35organizational design. There's a little bit of, you
- 35:38know, ML programming and the knowledge base got much, much
- 35:41better. And we were able to push that
- 35:43Gray area from 30 to 25 to 20 to 15 to 5:00.
- 35:48And that was not just great for the for the humans that we're
- 35:52dealing with all these user questions because now, you know,
- 35:55now they can have consistent answers, but it was great for
- 35:58the copilot because now the copilot clear up that knowledge
- 36:02base as well. But there are going to be
- 36:05scenarios where you do not have a black and white answer, right?
- 36:09And so are those I've heard folks say steer clear of those
- 36:12with your AI. It really depends.
- 36:16I look, I think AI is not going to be any more black and white
- 36:19than people are, right? So like, we can't, we can't
- 36:23expect AI to give us black and white answers to questions that
- 36:26are just like part of the human condition And like there's no
- 36:30right answer. Like we can't, just because
- 36:31there's a new technology doesn't mean that suddenly there's a
- 36:34right answer where there wasn't before.
- 36:36But we can generate a boatload of value if we, if we go to the
- 36:44areas of human knowledge that are where like most people agree
- 36:49and there's value to giving the answer that most people agree
- 36:52on. And that value, like if it's
- 36:54very expensive to get to that answer today, because you need
- 36:57very experienced, you know, expensive people to do it.
- 37:00And you're able to get the 8020 with, you know, like 80% of the,
- 37:06of the accuracy value area of agreement with like 20% of the
- 37:10cost, 10% of the cost. That's a, that's a huge value.
- 37:13We don't have to all agree on what poetry we like.
- 37:15We could just like focus on, you know, whatever, extracting data
- 37:21from financials, you know, so, so like all the, all the use
- 37:26cases that we know of, you know, for, for echo pilots.
- 37:29And I think like it's you, you, you would think like how, how
- 37:35does a company compete in this kind of in this kind of area?
- 37:38Like how does an engineer compete?
- 37:39But also how does an organization compete?
- 37:41So there's going to be, there's usually some secret sauce to
- 37:44every business. And right, you know, in the
- 37:47beginning, that secret sauce is in the head of the founder, in
- 37:50the head of the partners, the senior, let's say 5 to 3% of the
- 37:54people. And if there's a way to scale
- 37:56that, basically to apply that, not to publish that secret
- 37:59sauce, but to apply it at scale so that the bot applies the same
- 38:05level of nuance and the same level of special sauce that the
- 38:09senior partner does. That's a huge value unlock for
- 38:13the organization, right? Like in my example, you know,
- 38:16there's probably like there were a couple of people that had a
- 38:19really good nuanced understanding of cash.
- 38:22It's just that they that that value that was in their heads
- 38:26was not communicated to all the callers.
- 38:28So you basically hit the lottery.
- 38:30Like if you get somebody who thought it was one thing or the
- 38:33other, you wouldn't even know. Like you wouldn't know that
- 38:35you're getting part of the value.
- 38:36But as a company, we all wanted to figure out what is the best
- 38:41answer and give it to everybody, even if the best answer includes
- 38:43some options, right? And this kind of process is a
- 38:47way not just to make the AI more accurate, but to help domain
- 38:51experts, like kind of settle that value pyramid.
- 38:56Then when you talk about the nuances in someone's head and
- 39:00then being able to translate that to reality, for lack of a
- 39:06better term, the thing that instantly came to my mind was
- 39:09wow, I could do that with folks that I get documents from.
- 39:16And sometimes one thing that I do not like doing is getting on
- 39:22calls with folks. If it could have been an e-mail
- 39:25or if it could have been in document, I would prefer for it
- 39:28to be a document 1st and then I'm happy to get on a call
- 39:31afterwards once we have established what it is that we
- 39:35are talking about, right, and what the problems are, etcetera,
- 39:39etcetera. What I find though is sometimes
- 39:43you can be working with someone and the document is amazing and
- 39:48it's like, wow, this is incredible.
- 39:51There's so much here. It's very clear, it's really
- 39:55well put together, it flows and you can just comment on it and
- 39:59whatever you can't figure out in the comments, that's when you
- 40:02get on the call. Other times I'm like, holy crap,
- 40:06this document is a mess. And it's not a mess because I
- 40:09make a lot of documents that are just brain dumps and those are a
- 40:13mess. But it's a mess because it is so
- 40:18verbose or it is so AI generated that it hurts my eyes to even
- 40:22read it. And then there it's not clear
- 40:24what are we? What is this document for?
- 40:26What are we even doing here? Where's the meat and potatoes of
- 40:30this whole document? And so I was thinking about, I
- 40:34wonder how I can start getting the ways that I enjoy, like
- 40:41documents that I really appreciate using those as my
- 40:45eval set and then saying, all right, anytime anyone brings me
- 40:48a document, just as run it through an LLM and say here, I
- 40:55want to make sure how can I make this better so that it aligns
- 40:58with these documents or so that it's more in Demetrius style?
- 41:03100%, You know, I mean, Demetrius, you and Sofia built
- 41:06an amazing community. There is a special sauce to
- 41:09building a community. Like I don't know how to do it.
- 41:12So right now, in order to get that special sauce out there,
- 41:18you've got to put your own personal touch on it.
- 41:21And I can tell your style because I read some of your
- 41:25LinkedIn posts and I've been to some of your conferences.
- 41:27Like, it's distinctive, but you and your community would benefit
- 41:33a lot if in addition to when you're able to be there in
- 41:39person, you could figure out a way to scale your style to like
- 41:43all the touch points that are just like you.
- 41:45You only have 24 hours a day. You got to sleep like I do.
- 41:48So if there was a way to scale your style, your community would
- 41:52grow that much faster, get that much more value.
- 41:54It doesn't. It's not about replacing you.
- 41:56It's about like just taking the the thing that's unique, the
- 42:00thing that made you guys grow and making it accessible to
- 42:02people, even if like whatever, you know, even if they can't be
- 42:07at the show. Yeah.
- 42:09There's something that I wanted to mention before we move on to
- 42:12around the whole subject matter expert piece because you had
- 42:17said this before and it's worth repeating how traditionally when
- 42:23engineers are building SAS products, it's OK if they are
- 42:28not the subject matter expert and they don't bring in the
- 42:31subject matter expert. Because at the end of the day,
- 42:35the users will suffer through it.
- 42:37And if it kind of helps and it kind of gets the job done,
- 42:40that's great. It's useful.
- 42:42However, now if you're trying to create a copilot and you're
- 42:47doing it without the subject matter expert, you're probably
- 42:51not going to get very far because it's not going to be
- 42:54that valuable. So the crucial piece here is
- 42:59again, like hammering on this, how you can bring in that
- 43:01subject matter expert and make it easy for them so they don't
- 43:05have the blank page problem where they don't have to learn
- 43:07how to code and they're not firing off Python scripts or, or
- 43:11having to really update Proms to make it better.
- 43:15So, so that is something that I, I really wanted to hit on
- 43:19because I, it resonates with me a ton.
- 43:22Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Dimitris.
- 43:24I think it's yeah. Like if you imagine, you know,
- 43:27you're building, I don't know, building SAP or you're building
- 43:30Salesforce.com. Maybe it's an inventory
- 43:32management system or ERP or whatever it is.
- 43:34It's basically a couple forms and all you really have to do is
- 43:39the engineer. You have to make sure that the
- 43:41data goes where it needs to go. Like it's so it's pretty black
- 43:44and white. You just have to like not lose
- 43:46the data and the form has to render, you know, there's, it's
- 43:50pretty clear, like when you've messed up, it's pretty clear.
- 43:53And you will on purpose avoid any kind of situations where I
- 43:59don't know, you need to render you, you need domain expertise.
- 44:04You'll avoid those because you're going to try to stay to
- 44:06the, you know, the objective piece.
- 44:09And in the AI world, it's kind of flipped on its head because
- 44:13the value is in delivering domain expertise more broadly,
- 44:17cheaply, scalably. So if that's the goal, like if
- 44:21you're trying to, and whether that domain expertise is
- 44:24finance, legal, architecture, whatever it is like AI is
- 44:27reaching into all these places. That's really the new part.
- 44:30The new part is not being able to draw a GUI from scratch.
- 44:34Like, yeah, it's kind of exciting when you talk to AII
- 44:37could draw a GUI from scratch, but we know what it's like to
- 44:40draw GUI's. Like we've seen that before.
- 44:41The exciting part, the economic value, the new part, the unlock
- 44:45is you know, you deliver legal expertise that used to cost 500
- 44:51bucks an hour. You deliver it for 5 bucks an
- 44:53hour or architectural expertise or medical or whatever.
- 44:57It is like stuff that people really, really need and used to
- 45:01only be accessible to the few and now it's way cheaper
- 45:04accessible to the many. That's the unlock.
- 45:07And in order to get that unlock, you need a different skill set.
- 45:11Like that's, that's our challenge.
- 45:12We're so new. And it's the same challenge with
- 45:14every new technology. Like we, we got here because
- 45:17we're into the AI, like we're both you and me, we're into the
- 45:20gears. Like I love to see those gears
- 45:23going. I just want to like jam my hand
- 45:25in there and like fix it. And you know, I love playing
- 45:27with it, like getting my hands dirty.
- 45:29But the value from those gears is the main expertise that we
- 45:34don't really have. Like, so in a sense, the most
- 45:39successful features, the most successful products are going to
- 45:42be the ones where we can make the gears invisible.
- 45:45Everything that we're doing will be invisible.
- 45:48And the user will just have the experience of talking to an
- 45:52experienced lawyer or, or you know, or an experienced engineer
- 45:57or an experienced podcaster, right?
- 45:59Or, or community builder Like we're, we're, that's the magic.
- 46:03And in order to get that magic, we have to get these domain
- 46:07experts like right in there with us.
- 46:11And my suggestion, my humble suggestion is that evals are the
- 46:17most friendly medium to get domain experts into your
- 46:22workflow. They're much more friendly than
- 46:23asking them to write stuff from scratch to edit, to edit
- 46:28prompts. They because they're they're
- 46:30very flexible, they can grow to your needs.
- 46:33It's so funny you say that because the last podcast that I
- 46:38did an hour ago, before we were on here, the guy was talking
- 46:42about how in his product he put, he went and he had this idea of
- 46:48some fancy AI that he was going to add to his product.
- 46:51And after talking to all of his current user base, he realized,
- 46:55wow, people just want like to save some money on their law
- 46:59fees or their legal fees. So maybe we should try and
- 47:02figure out if we can use AI for that.
- 47:05And they ended up doing it and implementing it and it's been a
- 47:08huge success. And so you, I really like that,
- 47:12like taking something that you're used to paying a whole
- 47:15lot of money for and then can you, maybe it's not 100%, but it
- 47:21is at least trying to figure out a way to get expertise for much
- 47:26cheaper and figuring out how you can fit that into your product
- 47:32with the help of the subject matter experts.
- 47:34So now I want to jump on the topic of the LM as a judge
- 47:40because we kind of danced around it with the subject matter
- 47:44experts and how they can help the judge.
- 47:46What I am fascinated by is how many different ways you can do
- 47:53this LLM as a judge. And I've seen some papers that
- 47:56come out and say, no, just one LLM isn't enough, you need all
- 48:0012 of them. So it's like a jury or you need
- 48:04to be doing it where I I thought it was hilarious.
- 48:07It's like some researchers are hanging around in the dorm room
- 48:11and having their pizza and beers and saying, well, what if we did
- 48:15not one LLM judge call? It was two LLM judge calls.
- 48:21And that's a problem. He else is like, what if we did
- 48:23three of them? And so you just keep more LLM
- 48:27judge calls on top of it. And you see, is there a place
- 48:31where that will kind of pop out? So I know that you you've been
- 48:37doing a lot and give me the download on it.
- 48:40Yeah, that's an ICLR paper for sure, right.
- 48:42Just N + 1 LLM judges like you know, get get me the seat.
- 48:47OK, so before we talk about all the different ways of doing it,
- 48:53the how I propose a metric for deciding and the metric I
- 49:00propose is the human agreement rate.
- 49:03Because like, OK, we're talking about, we're swapping tips.
- 49:07Like we, you've read a paper and we have like, and there's lots
- 49:11of ways to do it and we're, we're, we're swamping
- 49:13techniques. And any time that you're
- 49:15debating like is technique A better or technique B better?
- 49:19Like should I have two or three or five?
- 49:21What's when is it going to any questions that you have about
- 49:24which one is better as an LM judge?
- 49:27Like there has to be a way to answer those questions.
- 49:28That's got to be like more than whichever one of us is like has
- 49:32the bigger audience or you, you like yelling, yelling more or,
- 49:35you know, as higher paid or whatever.
- 49:37They just should be a metric. So the metric I propose is
- 49:41whichever LLM judge approach reaches the highest human
- 49:45agreement rate. And that's just like not a human
- 49:47off the street, but like the humans of the matter for you,
- 49:50maybe it's your users, maybe it's your domain experts, We can
- 49:52define them in advance. And we're basically trying to
- 49:55optimize for that. And you know, we're ML people,
- 49:59we optimize, we understand what optimize means.
- 50:02So OK, so we start with the same approach, right?
- 50:06We start with like a simple LM judge, probably pick a cheap
- 50:09model, pick a simple prompt, and we measure the baseline human
- 50:14agreement rate. So in we have our eval set, we
- 50:18evaluate it with people, we evaluate it with the LM, we
- 50:20measure the agreement and it's whatever, it's 70%.
- 50:24And then we could try things we could try like the jury could be
- 50:27good because different models of different strengths.
- 50:29So for like for use cases where let's say some of the questions
- 50:33are heavy math and some of the questions are heavy creative
- 50:36writing, well, you know, maybe Claude is better at creative
- 50:39writing and maybe, I don't know, DeepSeek is better at math.
- 50:43And so if we, if we jury them together, maybe we can have
- 50:46higher human agreement rate, or maybe they'll just like fight
- 50:49with each other and we'll have less consistency and the human
- 50:52agreement rate will be less. My point is the empirical
- 50:55approach over the theoretical and like, try it with your data
- 50:59and with your eval instead of like taking my word for your
- 51:02word for the OR the paper. Like the guy who wrote the paper
- 51:05does not know what's going to give the highest human agreement
- 51:08rate for your task. And if you can unlock eighty
- 51:129095% human agreement rate with your domain experts, you'd be
- 51:16amazed how happy they would get because it's a lot of work off
- 51:21their plate. They don't have to look at any
- 51:24of the like whenever the LLM judge expresses confidence which
- 51:28is going to be 8090% of the cases.
- 51:30If they have high human agreement, then the domain
- 51:33experts can be like, I don't want to look at any of those,
- 51:35just give me the exceptions. So immediately, like their work
- 51:39drops down a couple of orders of magnitude.
- 51:41That's awesome then. So then would you say you have
- 51:46to always have those human curated eval sets before?
- 51:54Like you can't just raw dog with some LLM as a judge right from
- 51:58the. Yeah, you bring up a good point.
- 52:01There's a, there's a bit of a chicken and egg, right?
- 52:03Because like, like we said earlier, if you just, if you
- 52:06don't have anything and you, you start by coming to your human,
- 52:11human domain experts and you say like, here's a blank spreadsheet
- 52:15and show me all the things that teach me law.
- 52:19Basically, that's what you're saying.
- 52:21And they're going to be like, get the hell out of here.
- 52:23Like I, you know, I went to, I, I spent and I, I have clients
- 52:28and like, I don't have, I can't teach them.
- 52:30Too important for this. Right.
- 52:31But so I think like in the beginning, yes, you should
- 52:35probably like you come up with the E value yourself and you are
- 52:39the human that the LM judge should be agreeing with.
- 52:42Because if the LM judge does not agree with you on the first,
- 52:46let's say 20-30 examples in your, in your LM set, that's
- 52:51really, really easy to fix. It's a very tight loop.
- 52:53It's like you yourself and me, myself and I and I, I test a
- 52:57couple things. If the LM is doing things that I
- 52:59totally don't expect, I can just assert like, OK, maybe I don't
- 53:03need to be the world's greatest domain expert to deal with these
- 53:07like really simple few cases. I'm going to start there.
- 53:11And then once you have it, once the LOL judge behaves in a way
- 53:14that you trust on a small group of cases, which should not take
- 53:19long, we're talking about like days of work, maybe not, maybe
- 53:23not hours, maybe days of work less than a week.
- 53:25So if you have like some agreement on a very narrow base
- 53:29of knowledge, you could say, hey, domain expert, I basically
- 53:34got it as far as I can get it. Like I, I'm not a law expert,
- 53:38but it doesn't say totally crazy things that, that I don't
- 53:42understand. So I trust it and I could show
- 53:45you some things that it says. If you trust it, we could just
- 53:48let it go. If you want to get in the loop,
- 53:50you can. And I think they will want to
- 53:54like if it, if you've cleared the bar that you can clear
- 53:57yourself, they're much more likely to engage at the next
- 54:01level in my opinion. I like how you bring up this
- 54:06idea of we need a baseline of what we're comparing it to.
- 54:11So if we're using an LLM as a judge, what are we comparing it
- 54:14to? Let's start with something from
- 54:16me and then we'll bring in the subject matter expert when it's
- 54:20needed. But we'll get the basic stuff
- 54:23out of the way so that I'm not wasting some famous or some
- 54:27highly. Yeah.
- 54:28And there's a couple more hacks there, like you're trying to
- 54:30sort of accelerate learning, right?
- 54:32So imagine imagine that you're really like trying to teach
- 54:35somebody long without taking them through law school.
- 54:37So OK, you could start with just common sense.
- 54:40There's also probably, you know, there's probably some data sets
- 54:44out there that are available where you're just teaching them
- 54:47like basics. And then there might be a couple
- 54:50of examples where, you know, maybe your law firm has a
- 54:53different view on things. Like maybe your accounting firm
- 54:56has an idea that it's OK to take a chance in this particular and
- 55:01be aggressive in this like 1 niche because they have a
- 55:03variant view. And because you know that you
- 55:06work in the firm, you could just like build it in as a little as
- 55:10an, as an example, that knowledge is plastic and it can
- 55:12fit to what the firm thinks and not just what the standard
- 55:17benchmark thinks. And you could just build one or
- 55:19two of those to show your domain expert that what can be
- 55:23accomplished and they will put in more.
- 55:26When you're grading the LM judge responses, I imagine there's
- 55:33different vectors that you can grade it on.
- 55:35How do you look at that? Right, we call that criteria in
- 55:39our product and there are hundreds and just like every
- 55:42organization has a secret sauce, every evaluation will have
- 55:47different criteria that what it means, what success means.
- 55:51So, so I think it's a really juicy challenging area for a lot
- 55:58of people. I think there's a lot of value
- 56:00to first of all, having a library of criteria that's
- 56:03available off the shelf. And I don't think that it's
- 56:06enough to have like 5 or 10. Like I think you need a couple
- 56:09100 to cover all the different use cases.
- 56:11There's really 'cause they could be very, very different.
- 56:14And then probably beyond the standard library, there's, you
- 56:19know, you will want to create some that are specially for you,
- 56:23like special for your task. So not just creating the the
- 56:27eval, let's say the input and the output, but also creating
- 56:30the criteria, the prompt for the criteria and the definitions for
- 56:34the criteria are going to evolve as your system evolves.
- 56:37There's a lot of value to breaking down.
- 56:39Usually people will start with really broad criteria like
- 56:43accuracy. Accuracy is kind of a catch all,
- 56:45but it means different things to different people.
- 56:48And the way I've seen it evolve, maybe maybe you've seen
- 56:51something different, but the way I've seen it evolve is, you
- 56:53know, typically an engineer or engineering team will just
- 56:57define accuracy and they'll use like a non domain specific way
- 57:02to define accuracy and that the main experts will shit all over
- 57:06it be like, well, this got a five in accuracy, but it's
- 57:10totally missing that this guy's going to get sued or it's got a
- 57:135 and you know, it's got a one in accuracy.
- 57:15But there's all these good things about it.
- 57:17And you should, you should, you should get partial credit for
- 57:20that. They'll shit all over it.
- 57:22And that's great because they're engaged, you have feedback and
- 57:26the opportunity there is to break down the one accuracy
- 57:29criteria into probably like 3 or 4 that you can observe from the
- 57:33pattern of feedback that you get is very valuable activity.
- 57:36So like maybe they care about, I don't know, naming things
- 57:40correctly. That's one way of accuracy.
- 57:42And maybe they care about the length.
- 57:44That's a different, totally different axis of accuracy at
- 57:47the level of detail. Maybe they care about the
- 57:49refusal rate, Maybe they care about the how persistent you
- 57:54are, like how many times you've tried.
- 57:56So these are like all different dimensions that I find that the
- 58:00best way to elicit those is to show people obviously wrong
- 58:05things and then they they jump in and correct it.
- 58:08And that feedback loop is a really, really good.
- 58:11It's a good flywheel to get people to think more about what
- 58:13they want. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of a
- 58:18talk that Linus Lee gave at one of the conferences that we had
- 58:22last year. And he was really banging on
- 58:26about how in music you can see sound waves in different ways.
- 58:33And you have like if you're a producer, you have an equalizer
- 58:37that you can play with in the production or the the DAW and in
- 58:45filmmaking or in Lightroom for photographers, you have these
- 58:52histograms and they're so rich and you can change the photos
- 58:57output by playing around with the histograms.
- 59:00And his whole thing was, how can we bring that to AI output?
- 59:07Is there a way that we can now start creating more of a visual
- 59:11aspect of this output? And it makes me think about what
- 59:16you're saying here. There's all these different
- 59:18vectors and you have all these different criteria as you call
- 59:21them. And so is there a way that we
- 59:24can visualize this in like different ways so that it is
- 59:29more engaging for folks to look at?
- 59:32Yeah, 100%. You know, I think I think of it
- 59:35like an evolutionary process. We start with really big blocks
- 59:39that are really easy to put in place and we get more refined
- 59:42and more sophisticated over time and it kind of never stops.
- 59:45So, you know, it starts with accuracy and then it evolves
- 59:48into maybe 3 or 4 criteria. It can eventually evolve into a
- 59:52checklist. Checklists are super useful in a
- 59:55lot of medical scenarios, a lot of high risk scenarios where you
- 1:00:00know that you need to basically meet all these different
- 1:00:02criteria to be successful. It's hard to remember them all.
- 1:00:05It's, you know, it's hard for the best domain experts to
- 1:00:07remember the most perfect, perfect job for an LLM judge
- 1:00:10because they're tireless. They'll just be like super rigid
- 1:00:14and check all the things that you ask them to check, even if
- 1:00:18they're, you know, even if they've been doing it for a day.
- 1:00:21And humans are not like that. So, so it's a, it's a great way
- 1:00:25to scale a rubric, which is a set of criteria and scaling.
- 1:00:32It makes things fair and it makes things cheaper and makes
- 1:00:35things valuable. And as an organization, you want
- 1:00:38to have a feedback mechanism about the rubric, not just about
- 1:00:42the eval for, for the same like very same things.
- 1:00:45And we're, you know, we're finding that, you know, social
- 1:00:52media companies are revising their views about what is
- 1:00:56appropriate moderation. So like there used to be a
- 1:00:59rubric of how to, you know, how to grade a social media post and
- 1:01:04it was implemented one way. And for a long time every post
- 1:01:08was graded on this rubric. There were people grading it.
- 1:01:11And now we're in a different era and like it's been graded in a
- 1:01:14different way. The rubric changes.
- 1:01:15Yeah. So my point is that for for
- 1:01:18commercial application, LM application, AI application you
- 1:01:21want to have that flexibility as well your rubric change.