Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / [EXCLUSIVE EPISODE!] LLM Key Results
Transcript
- 0:14What's going on, everyone? I am Demetrios your host and
- 0:17misses the envelopes Community podcast.
- 0:19Today, we have a very special edition of this podcast, if you
- 0:24couldn't have guessed it by the title or ready, we are going
- 0:27over the survey results from the Large language models in
- 0:31production survey that we put out.
- 0:33We are going to be reviewing eight key insights.
- 0:36From the large language models surveys and just in case you
- 0:41want to go through and check out the data on your own.
- 0:44It's all out there. The link is in the description.
- 0:47It's all open source. So don't take my word on any of
- 0:50this. This is just a summary of some
- 0:53of the key findings that I found, as I was wrestling with
- 0:56the data, it is all unstructured data.
- 0:59That's I learned it's not the easiest to do but now I know and
- 1:04for the next one I'm going to make sure to give it a few more.
- 1:08Multiple choice questions. We plan to do another one of
- 1:12these at the conference that is happening on Thursday, April
- 1:1613th. So that is a virtual conference.
- 1:19It is free and we are going to release all of the data again.
- 1:23And another report this actually came from me, putting together
- 1:29the report and I I thought, wow, you know what would be awesome
- 1:32for those people that love podcasts like myself.
- 1:35If I just went through some of these findings that I am putting
- 1:38together in the report and I talked about them on this
- 1:41podcast, Last thing before we jump into all of the key
- 1:48insights and great findings from this.
- 1:50If you find any value in this episode whatsoever, the highest
- 1:54leverage thing that you can do right now is share this with one
- 1:58other person. You think will like it?
- 2:00It will help us grow. If you think about how you found
- 2:03this podcast, I imagine it's someone that told you about it.
- 2:07I don't think it was my social media Antics that got you to
- 2:11turn in. So Feel free to share this with
- 2:14one other person that would appreciate these key insights
- 2:19from the large language model in production survey that we put
- 2:22out. Alright, without further Ado,
- 2:25let's get into it. Okay, let's start by who
- 2:40participated in this survey. We want to know the profiles of
- 2:44the people we want to also know how they found out about it.
- 2:47And again how many people participated and from what dates
- 2:53was this survey open, we saw a large number of The Usual
- 2:58Suspects from the ml Ops community and there was a
- 3:02varying degree of seniority. But for the most part, I was
- 3:06quite surprised at how How many senior level participants we had
- 3:11that were filling out? This survey, lots of different
- 3:15names for the titles that each person had but at the end of the
- 3:21day, I was able to bucket them into a few different titles that
- 3:25I think encapsulate, the personas who participated.
- 3:31So these different buckets were machine, learning, engineer, /ml
- 3:36Ops engineer. I don't really know what.
- 3:38Differences there. But obviously, some people have
- 3:41different titles and that's what we're going to go with.
- 3:43Then there was Data scientists of all degrees, different kinds
- 3:48of scientists. You even had the outlier of the
- 3:51deep learning scientists, all of that, great stuff.
- 3:54We also had head of data, head of ml, head of ml, Ops cdo's
- 4:01those head of positions. There was a quite a few of those
- 4:05and I'll break down all the percentages.
- 4:08Has in just a moment. We had some founder CEOs,
- 4:11actually a bit of founder, CEOs, some ctOS product head of
- 4:16product product owners and then miscellaneous was the rest that
- 4:22were those outliers. Like there was one analytics
- 4:24engineer. There was a few Consultants, a
- 4:26cloud engineer marketing manager, at that kind of thing.
- 4:30For the machine learning Engineers.
- 4:32We had about 22 percent of the respondents being machine
- 4:37learning engineer. Again, this is mainly senior or
- 4:41staff machine learning Engineers, but there was also
- 4:45just the normal machine learning engineer.
- 4:47We had data scientists with varying degrees of seniority,
- 4:51but the majority were those senior data scientists and there
- 4:59was a little less than twenty percent of the respondents being
- 5:04data, scientists, or identifying as data scientists, we have Had
- 5:08about 13 percent being the head of data roles and a little over.
- 5:1515 percent were the founder CEO, roles under 5% were ctOS, just
- 5:22at five percent was the product owners and then the
- 5:28miscellaneous category got about 15 percent.
- 5:32In total, we had 108 people fill this out, which for me, Awesome.
- 5:38I think we can do better the next time but that's incredible
- 5:41that we got 108 people to talk about how they are using large
- 5:45language models in production. The way that we got the word out
- 5:48about this was about 20 minutes before we had our Roundtable
- 5:52session on using large language models in production that
- 5:56happened to almost a month ago. We asked the attendees to fill
- 6:01out this survey and we also had a few of our influencer friends,
- 6:06tweet out a link to the survey. To get a bit more traction.
- 6:09The survey was open from March 11th until around March 23rd.
- 6:15That's when the majority of the responses came in and we started
- 6:20playing with the data. Okay?
- 6:22So let's take a look at this actual survey and what some of
- 6:26these key insights were then I'll break down how I'm going to
- 6:29structure the rest of this episode.
- 6:32The main Insight Above All, Is that the majority of companies
- 6:38Are still entering the early stages of using large language
- 6:41models in production in their business, or to put it another
- 6:47way. It's we're still figuring out
- 6:50how we can use these large language models and what use
- 6:54cases they're going to produce the highest value.
- 6:59There are some challenges right now.
- 7:02We saw a lot of respondents saying that there's challenges
- 7:05in cost in latency and The output variability and other
- 7:11infrastructure sophistication efforts, still hinder teams from
- 7:16extracting the most value from their Investments.
- 7:19So as a result of this, you know what's coming, there's going to
- 7:23be an influx of venture capital jumping into this sector.
- 7:27It's already happening. You probably have seen some
- 7:31developer tools for large language models getting funding
- 7:35recently in the last couple weeks.
- 7:37Well, Please see a boom in the number of LM infrastructure
- 7:41companies and developer tooling providing services to overcome
- 7:45these obstacles that we found in the survey.
- 7:49I want to highlight eight key findings right now and then I
- 7:53want to structure the rest of this podcast into four different
- 7:58pieces. One is the different use cases
- 8:01that people talked about. The next is, the special tooling
- 8:06that people were saying they They were creating for this new
- 8:10paradigm, then there are the challenges and concerns that our
- 8:16respondents addressed, and the last one open questions and
- 8:20opportunities. Let's dive into these eight key
- 8:24findings real fast, and what they say about the llm in
- 8:29production landscape. And just as a heads up, I may
- 8:34refer to LMS as Lems because it's a little bit easier to say
- 8:38And I've heard that maybe catching on.
- 8:40So in case you hear me say that don't get confused.
- 8:46Okay, so these eight key findings are as followed number
- 8:49one, common use cases like text generation and summarization.
- 8:54Those are quite useful but the participants of this survey are
- 8:59trying to go deeper and they're exploring ways to use large
- 9:03language models for data enrichment with data labeling
- 9:06augmentation. Synthetic data creation and
- 9:10question generation for subject matter experts, or get into all
- 9:15of that, a little bit more in our use cases section because I
- 9:18find it fascinating these creative ways to use the large
- 9:23language models. Number two, is that the decision
- 9:27to use large language models within an organization is still
- 9:31unclear due to the high cost and unknown Roi on this number.
- 9:38Is that the challenges around limbs speed of inference?
- 9:42Make certain use cases. Absolutely impossible.
- 9:45They're completely off the table.
- 9:47Number four is that the current infrastructure is not designed
- 9:53for such massive models. So that means the current
- 9:56developer tooling, it doesn't take into account these gigantic
- 10:01models and this leads teams to implementing workarounds for
- 10:06quick fixes which which we'll get into more in the challenges
- 10:10section. Number five, the fifth key
- 10:13Insight is that companies are building custom tooling to help
- 10:16with pains around output validation and prompt tracking
- 10:21that. Again, we're going to jump into
- 10:23in the key challenges because the output validation seems to
- 10:28be like a thorn in the side. Number six, following up on that
- 10:35output validation is Hallucinations present a real
- 10:40ethical and business concern. So much so that for some
- 10:46companies, it just makes using large language models as
- 10:51showstopper they cannot associate their brand with this
- 10:56output. Number 7 is that there is a
- 11:00larger question looming in the air and it is which part of the
- 11:05current workflows that we have. Have today will be replaced
- 11:11versus will be augmented. Leaders are trying to figure out
- 11:17what can we completely use large language models for and what can
- 11:24we augment our workers with large language models?
- 11:29And the last one number eight, is that prompting is a very
- 11:33valuable skill, but even the best prom Oops, cannot force the
- 11:39model to give reliable output. Let's get into these different
- 11:46sections. The use cases, special tooling
- 11:48challenges and concerns, and the open questions and opportunities
- 11:52for your information real fast. Out of the 108 people that
- 11:58responded to the question if they are using large language
- 12:02models in their organization 60 point seven percent of them
- 12:07said, yes they are. And 39.3% said no they are not.
- 12:14So, talking about the use cases, there are quickly emerging a set
- 12:21of use cases that lend themselves.
- 12:23Well, to this type of technology in its current state.
- 12:28This is dated on April 10th. So potentially in two weeks open
- 12:34a.i. comes out with a new release that completely destroys
- 12:38all of this. But for now on April 10th we are
- 12:41talking about certain ologies and certain use cases that are
- 12:47more suited for the use of large language models than others.
- 12:53The first one that was surprising to me was that
- 12:56recommendation engines are being rethought, this instantly made
- 13:02me wonder is are we going to do recommender systems differently
- 13:07and at a high level? It's quite fascinating to think
- 13:11about because recommender systems, generally and
- 13:15traditionally are very much the for real-time systems.
- 13:20And these large language models do not Not have that capability
- 13:24right now. However, the respondents did
- 13:27highlight that they are using large language models in their
- 13:31recommender system, workflow to help create semantic Vector
- 13:35embeddings as a feature to help with feature extraction and this
- 13:41was the most popular answer helping with feature extraction.
- 13:45So asking large language model which features are actually
- 13:48useful here and the last one is helping with Recommendations.
- 13:54However, this one to me and this is just my feeling, it is not
- 14:01the respondents but this one feels like the most juvenile.
- 14:05The helping with feature recommendations, I do not see
- 14:09that one being as useful in this moment in time just because of
- 14:13the latency requirements that you need the next use case that
- 14:18we saw many respondents talking about were what I am calling.
- 14:23A niche chatbots. So chatbots, we all know them,
- 14:28they've pinned the bane of the internet since being introduced
- 14:32in whenever 2010 around then and we all have been on the phone
- 14:38with recording. And it says, please enter here,
- 14:41or please say what you're looking for that is annoying and
- 14:46that is a horrible user experience.
- 14:48Just like, I feel up until now chatbots have been a horrible
- 14:52user. Terrence I always try to get
- 14:54somebody on the live chat as opposed to speaking with a
- 14:58chatbot up until now. So chatbots all of a sudden with
- 15:04chat GPT they exploded and it started to show that there is
- 15:09lots of potential here and how the different participants are
- 15:14using chatbots was actually a bit surprising.
- 15:20So why do we call them Niche chatbots?
- 15:23Well, basically they are specialized large language,
- 15:27model, chat box on narrow domain topics.
- 15:33These chat, Bots are being used for both external and internal
- 15:38facing scenarios with the internal being the most
- 15:43fascinating to me. So the internal Niche chat Bots
- 15:47are showing promise When they are helping workers quickly
- 15:52query diverse knowledge, bases, across the company and you can
- 15:56imagine that this is only going to become more relevant as all
- 16:03of this disparate data is in a million different places and if
- 16:08you can connect up a large language model that sits on top
- 16:12of it and understands all of it has been fine-tuned with it or
- 16:15is able to quickly get that data that you are.
- 16:20Looking for and give you an answer back then that will
- 16:24continue to prove out its value. This is a predominant one with
- 16:31the majority of respondents answering with the phrase
- 16:37information retrieval that is the idea and that is the use
- 16:42case. That people talked about
- 16:43internal uses of information retrieval and an outlier case.
- 16:50Case for these Niche chatbots full of potential is internal
- 16:56facing chatbots to help power up.
- 16:58Managers by having them quickly, understand context around
- 17:03projects, get the right data that they need or answer
- 17:07relevant questions that they may have around project details.
- 17:12So that's the niche chatbots. The next one up is around
- 17:17customer support customer support.
- 17:20Again, as I was mentioning earlier, it's not a novel use
- 17:23case. It is however, quickly being
- 17:27proven out as one of the strongest use cases, aside from
- 17:32these chatbots that we were just talking about, there are other
- 17:35ways that limbs are being used with customer support, one being
- 17:41identity matching. So, determining, if multiple
- 17:46records on file match, the same real world identity.
- 17:50T. Another one being analyzing
- 17:53customer service. Responses that is awesome.
- 17:58So, being able to say which customer service responses
- 18:03actually have value, and allowing the customer service
- 18:08reps who get those responses back to gather data and quickly,
- 18:14understand what the customers felt was good or bad and the
- 18:19last But one, which goes hand-in-hand with analyzing
- 18:22customer service, responses is analyzing the customer feedback
- 18:26forms, and not only analyzing customer feedback forms, but
- 18:32understanding the sentiment, so sentiment analysis in the text,
- 18:36and then also automating the writing of reports based on the
- 18:41feedback data. Again, this goes back to that
- 18:44larger theme of the summarization is a killer use
- 18:50case. Next up, we have coding and just
- 18:54about everybody has heard of GitHub copilot.
- 18:57As you may know, GitHub copilot X is out and it is leveraging
- 19:02GPT for coding is another strong use case that we saw come
- 19:06through and it is more than just asking GPT for to create a
- 19:11function for you. Some of the respondents
- 19:14highlighted that they are using large language models to help
- 19:19them analyze logs to help. Them with security,
- 19:23vulnerabilities, root cause analysis.
- 19:27There's lots of things that you can just throw into these models
- 19:30and get help with. But the bigger theme that is a
- 19:34significant one. Is that these models are being
- 19:38used like a translation service if we could call it that some
- 19:43use cases for translating or obviously going from one
- 19:47programming language to another, I have something written in
- 19:50Python and now I would like to Write it in Rust.
- 19:55However, I am not sure how strong that use case holds up.
- 19:59And I would love to hear more from people out there because I
- 20:03just feel like the level of abstractions when you're writing
- 20:06it, python versus writing it rust or going to be completely
- 20:10different. But we need to do a whole nother
- 20:14survey just on how developers are using large language models.
- 20:18But anyway, I digress, the other Ation parts that people were
- 20:24talking about wer with just natural language to sequel.
- 20:30That is becoming one that is showing promise or translating
- 20:35an Excel report into python code.
- 20:39So this idea of translation I thought was fascinating and that
- 20:43was one that you see a little bit.
- 20:46But I'd love to see how participants are taking that
- 20:49even further and the last one on our use case map is the data
- 20:57enrichment. So you have synthetic data
- 21:01generation, synthetic image generation, you also have data
- 21:05annotation something like clip, interrogator, or Dare we mention
- 21:13Google training Bart with GPT there.
- 21:17You've got a little bit of data annotation happening, I'm not
- 21:20sure. If people are super stoked to
- 21:24talk about that one, but it happened.
- 21:25So might as well say it, there's also this use case that I get
- 21:30really excited about, which is question generation and so it's
- 21:35knowing the right questions to ask at various stages of a task.
- 21:41So when you are going, and let's say you're working your way
- 21:44through a project, the large language model understands the
- 21:48development and how the Act is going and it is able to ask you
- 21:52if you've done XYZ or if you've thought about this or that that
- 21:57use case is really incredible especially if it's able to feed
- 22:01in all of your specific data for that project and your company
- 22:06and then it can help you get better at completing projects or
- 22:11thinking through different side effects, that your decisions may
- 22:17have the other piece when it comes to question.
- 22:21Is analyzing data and asking if a subject matter expert has
- 22:26considered XYZ. So these on the data enrichment
- 22:29side, I think are incredible especially when it comes to the
- 22:32question generation and we all know the quality of the
- 22:36questions cannot be understated. All right, let's move on to
- 22:42special tooling now and who and how the different respondents
- 22:48identified their All tooling that they have and what they
- 22:53were doing to make sure that they can successfully.
- 22:57Put these large language models into production.
- 23:01So out of the 57 people that said yes they were using large
- 23:05language models in production and remember this is 60 point
- 23:09seven percent of the respondents 51 of those 57 said that they
- 23:17were building some kind of tooling.
- 23:20To support their use cases. And this 51 number is a little
- 23:26bit deceiving because it was 51 people in varying degrees of
- 23:32sophistication or building internal tooling.
- 23:35So some just said, yes, building internal tooling.
- 23:38They didn't give any more details.
- 23:40Others said yes I'm creating a product around it so you can
- 23:45guess this goes back to this main theme of there's going to
- 23:48be a boom in Products that come out Very soon.
- 23:51Others said, things like we're using hugging face inference and
- 23:55points and a few internal things that we've built around that or
- 24:00were using rasa for chatbots, or some said, yeah, we're using
- 24:04open e. I and a couple of internal tools
- 24:07to support that some mentioned that they're using database
- 24:10connections. And then you have what I would
- 24:13say is the different or the more advanced use cases where people
- 24:20are saying We've deployed our own open source, large language
- 24:24model, and then you have people saying that, yes, they have
- 24:27their own tools for training setups as well as inference
- 24:31setups or another respondents said internally.
- 24:33We use Bert to create embeddings, then we train a
- 24:36smaller model on customer data. And the last one I want to point
- 24:40out is a respondent who said that they have a platform
- 24:43internally to develop and run models in production called stat
- 24:47fish. So, there we go.
- 24:49That's the varying. Um, degrees of maturity in the
- 24:54internal tooling that people have built.
- 24:56And this is fascinating, there was an example of a full-stack
- 25:02toolkit that came through and it was Lang chain on open a.i.
- 25:08Playground with little chat GPT prompt layer the tool and we V8
- 25:14the vector data base. So I thought that was awesome to
- 25:17see that. There's like a mean stack or a
- 25:19marine stack, that is emerging and We also have some tooling
- 25:23that has been created around output validation and we're
- 25:29starting to see more tools come out because of that, I think
- 25:33there's an open source tool now that is called guardrails,
- 25:36that's coming out that should help with that.
- 25:38But this is a huge one output validation is you'll see in the
- 25:43challenges section. It's a headache.
- 25:46The other pieces are because these language models are so big
- 25:51Some of the special tooling that has been created is a high scale
- 25:56server. On top of kubernetes that is all
- 26:00built in-house. There you have it.
- 26:01It's the rainbow of different tooling and I imagine it will
- 26:07not be long before we see an explosion of tools coming out.
- 26:11So that's a perfect segue into the main challenges and concerns
- 26:15section of this, the current infrastructure.
- 26:19Let's just face it, it's probably Matic at best because
- 26:23teams are having to implement workarounds and quick fixes.
- 26:27This one came up so much, whether you're handling, very
- 26:31large documents, or your handling, very large models, you
- 26:35have. When it comes to the documents,
- 26:37you have a input limit, you have to use Vector databases, you
- 26:41have memory requirements. During the inference, all of
- 26:46that around the infrastructure and just dealing with a lot more
- 26:50data and a lot. Lot bigger models.
- 26:52Now, this may not be as much of a problem if we see more open
- 26:58source models come out onto the market, I imagine a lot of you
- 27:02have seen what was done with llama and how small they were
- 27:06able to make that model. Potentially that could fix some
- 27:09of these headaches. But I'm not quite sure around
- 27:13the legalities of Lama and if you are able to use it for
- 27:17commercial use, I should inform myself more about it.
- 27:20But if anyone knows Just let us know in the comments and tell us
- 27:24about what you can and can't do with Mama.
- 27:27I just know there was some kind of drama or controversy around
- 27:29it. Anyway, moving on, there is a
- 27:32lot of pain around latency again.
- 27:36What we talked about in those key findings is that certain use
- 27:40cases just cannot be done. You can't do fraud detection
- 27:45with large language models because the latency is a blocker
- 27:50you can't wait around. For 20 seconds to determine if
- 27:53someone is being fraudulent or not.
- 27:56And why would you when the current machine learning models
- 28:00in the way that people are doing fraud detection right now is
- 28:03working quite well. Another huge concern that came
- 28:06up quite a bit, was the cost concern and this was almost like
- 28:1190% of the answers to the question around concern and not
- 28:17only that. But if you dig a Little Deeper,
- 28:20a big question is Does the high-cost actually have an Roi,
- 28:25or are we just jumping onto some hype wave?
- 28:28There's not really a queer way to show the ROI.
- 28:34And so, that's what these respondents are trying to figure
- 28:38out. How can we prove that this
- 28:40actually is giving us a return on our investment, especially if
- 28:44we are paying a ton of money to someone for the privilege?
- 28:51Judge to use these large, language models, another
- 28:54challenge, huge challenge, are the hallucinations and being
- 28:58able to trust the output, just being able to reproduce the same
- 29:05output and have quality output is easier said than done.
- 29:11There are also ethical concerns around who is the nation's and
- 29:15attaching your brand. To these hallucinations, we all
- 29:20know what happened to Google. And the stock price after they
- 29:23released Bart. And there was a bit of a
- 29:26hallucination, I jokingly put that my New Year's resolution is
- 29:30to be as confident as chat GPT when it just spews out bullshit.
- 29:35I think that for any of these use cases that are high-risk
- 29:40using large language models, is just a no-go because of the
- 29:43hallucinations and the trust issues here.
- 29:46You also have participants that mention explain ability is just
- 29:50practically. Lee off the table and they're
- 29:52trying to figure out ways to explain how the models have
- 29:56gotten to the answers that they've gotten too but it is
- 30:00increasingly more difficult and really getting to the ground.
- 30:04Truth was another one that participants mentioned is not as
- 30:07easy as you would expect and when you're dealing with use
- 30:10cases that have anything to do with compliance or regulation,
- 30:14you really have to be careful and it makes it a lot more
- 30:20risky. To do anything with large
- 30:23language models. Oh and last thing I'll say about
- 30:26the ethical concerns is some of the respondents talked about
- 30:30intellectual property and how they do not know what data was
- 30:35used to train these models and they do not know if they are
- 30:41legally able to use the output from these models.
- 30:46Considering the data that it may have been trained on could be
- 30:49copy written. So a huge challenge that came up
- 30:55time and time again in this survey was prompting and how the
- 31:02consistency of prompting and what to say, exploring latent,
- 31:09space exploring things we find out about a new way to talk to
- 31:14these large language models every week and so that is a
- 31:19challenge also cash. Caching the prompts or prompt
- 31:25tooling we're starting to see more of these companies.
- 31:29That is cool to see but prompting feels a bit like it
- 31:34could be just an artifact on along the way.
- 31:38I'm not sure if the end State really, if you think about us in
- 31:43the future 20 years from now, are we really going to be trying
- 31:47to still explore late in space through prompts?
- 31:50It feels like Probably got a better way to go about that.
- 31:55Also when it comes to prompts, is there a nuanced way of
- 31:59getting better output? Is there a way of controlling
- 32:03the output that is very unclear and that goes back to the
- 32:07ethical concerns. Reliable output is something
- 32:11that we saw pop up time and time again and reliable output
- 32:19through correct. Oops, goes back to those ethical
- 32:25mishaps. It's hand-in-hand.
- 32:29One of the respondents said that it took us less than three
- 32:33minutes to get bio GPT to tell us vaccines cause autism it's
- 32:40probably been trained on quite a few Reddit threads that I am
- 32:43familiar with or some of my uncle's Facebook data but that's
- 32:48a whole nother story. Now the Smaller models are
- 32:54easier to control as far as output goes, but they're not
- 32:58perfect. So how can we monitor the
- 33:03output? How can we make the output
- 33:05secure and how can we get that consistency in quality?
- 33:11There are certain teams that are looking at output validation
- 33:16because they fear the model is hallucinating and the company
- 33:20may not be catching it. So so the hallucinations and
- 33:24outputs are again. So detrimental to the company's
- 33:28reputation, it can cause bad press for the company.
- 33:32It can just be embarrassing and depending on the use case, it
- 33:35can also be really bad for the user.
- 33:38Let's not forget about that. So the big question here when it
- 33:41comes to prompting for me is, do we want to try and move to
- 33:45something different? What is going to be the end
- 33:49state? Are we going to continue with
- 33:50prompting or as this? Just some 2023 fun thing that we
- 33:56do for a little while. I personally find it fascinating
- 34:00that we already have very efficient ways of talking to
- 34:03computers through programming, but now, we're just saying.
- 34:07Yeah, forget about all that. Let's try and have the computer.
- 34:11Understand what we mean when we talk to it and natural language,
- 34:15even though natural language can be interpreted many different
- 34:18ways. If you recall, The last time you
- 34:22spoke to someone or you got into an argument over something over
- 34:27text, you can know that the same phrase can be interpreted many
- 34:33different ways. So I just wonder is prompting
- 34:37the end State, okay, when it comes to some of the technical
- 34:40pains and challenges respondents talked about how there was
- 34:45rapidly changing apis, and that is just a headache whether it's
- 34:50open AI or the newest Shiny tool thing that is moving so fast and
- 34:55it's breaking changes are very commonplace.
- 34:58There's no such standards and respondents talked about how
- 35:02this is not something that they enjoy because then debugging
- 35:07becomes a lot harder. And again, with some technical
- 35:11pains, the current tooling out there almost forces you to use
- 35:15Python which is not as fun for the front end programmers.
- 35:21And also it's not as fun. For those who want to go, really
- 35:24deep into the lower level languages.
- 35:28When it comes to fine-tuning, it's not super straightforward
- 35:34and it is not clear how you can do that.
- 35:37And also, how much of an increase you get in the model
- 35:41output, it's easier to do on smaller models.
- 35:45So it may begs the question, are we going to go for Full Circle
- 35:50and potentially end? A year or so we're going to all
- 35:53be using smaller models again because you don't have to deal
- 35:57with these latency requirements or the latency problems and you
- 36:01can fine-tune them easier. And the when it comes to
- 36:04fine-tuning, one of the respondents said, how can I make
- 36:08answers be focused on what my company is doing rather than
- 36:12just the general answers. So how do I feed it enough of my
- 36:16company's data? So that becomes the default
- 36:18answer rather than what it's been trained on before and and
- 36:22then on top of that to build on it, how do we keep that
- 36:26information of the company evolving?
- 36:30As we learn more about the customers and how do we keep
- 36:34practical jokers who are conversing with the models to
- 36:39not inject some kind of practical joke in there and
- 36:44destroy the whole output of the model?
- 36:46So the security on that side of things is a little bit of a
- 36:51questions. We'll end this goes back to.
- 36:54How can we judge the model to give us different output that
- 36:59we're looking for? What does it do?
- 37:01We need to start creating better keywords or is there a way that
- 37:04we can figure it out through late in space and prompting?
- 37:08All right, on the business side of things, there were a few
- 37:12fascinating questions that came through in the challenges
- 37:15section. And the first one is just how
- 37:18useful is this really some of the respondents that are not Not
- 37:22using large languages in production but they have played
- 37:26around with it. They said, look, there's a lot
- 37:29of hype out there and we can use this.
- 37:32But at this moment in time, it is a headache and to create a
- 37:38business case out of it, what do we need to do?
- 37:41How can we prove that? It is truly useful and then
- 37:47others were saying I just really don't know if I To be using
- 37:52smaller models and train it on relevant data or if I should be
- 37:57trying to just use the hottest, newest model.
- 38:02That is the most performant again on the business.
- 38:07Use case. A lot of people highlighted that
- 38:10they are not very excited to be dependent on just one company's
- 38:16API. They feel that there is a
- 38:19monopoly and many respondents It said that they prefer if there
- 38:24was some kind of public model with the same performance and
- 38:28weights that were public, that would be an incredible relief
- 38:32and coming back to this Monopoly idea.
- 38:35Some respondents asked, should we pay for a third-party
- 38:39provider to train our own model so that we do not have to be
- 38:45dependent on an external API? I know that people talked about
- 38:50how really, if you Are dependent on, open a eyes, API and open a.
- 38:56I for some reason, has an outage boom, there goes your business.
- 39:00And speaking of business, the high cost of production is
- 39:04something that people could not stop talking about whether it's
- 39:07inference cost, its infrastructure cost, its human
- 39:11cost of people that actually know how to do stuff with this
- 39:14the ROI on using large language models.
- 39:17In production is not clear. Now, let's move on to the last
- 39:21section, which is open questions and opportunities that the
- 39:25respondents had as they went through the big three questions
- 39:30that came up from. So many of these answers were
- 39:34around fine-tuning embeddings or inference.
- 39:39And some big questions that I found fascinating from the
- 39:43respondents were, when does the ROI and cost trade off happen?
- 39:49For Or open a, i apis versus open source.
- 39:53Is it when you're serving 5,000 users versus serving 500,000
- 39:59users? When do you think it justifies
- 40:03going to open source and doing everything in-house?
- 40:07The other big question that was up in the air is just how do you
- 40:11decide where to use large language models?
- 40:14And who in the organization is helping champion this and
- 40:18helping others. Learn how they can augment what
- 40:21they're doing Beyond, just the text summarization.
- 40:26How do you decide which models to use and what is good enough?
- 40:31It's very unclear, all the different models out there and
- 40:36also if there's any security vulnerabilities around them, if
- 40:39there are any big problems, like the hallucinations you may say,
- 40:44oh this model is great at doing x y z, but it has a A big
- 40:50knowledge Gap or a big hole when it is talking about this theme
- 40:56or this topic. So how do you decide which model
- 40:59to use and what is good enough continuing along with some of
- 41:04these open questions that it doesn't feel like have been
- 41:08solved yet. And that these participants have
- 41:12been grappling with is, how are you thinking about tracking user
- 41:17feedback in production? How do you get that ground?
- 41:20Truth again going back to one of those challenges.
- 41:24How do you know that things are working and it's working for the
- 41:27better. How are you managing the
- 41:31training / deployment of these large language models?
- 41:36What are some of the best practices for dealing with large
- 41:39language models or foundational models in general?
- 41:43Is there anything that you can see as far as trends?
- 41:48Go where Where people are saying, look, if you're doing
- 41:52this, you might want to have this in mind.
- 41:56And then the other best practices around preventing
- 42:00leakage for client facing models, that employ online
- 42:05learning and to finish up. We have a few stories from the
- 42:09participants that I wanted to talk about because I think you
- 42:14will get a few laughs out of it. I know I did one of the prompts
- 42:18that one of the respondents said, was their new favorite
- 42:23prompt. Is that you take, you say,
- 42:27whatever it is that you want the large language model to Output,
- 42:32you give it the question, your give it the prompt and then you
- 42:35finish it off by saying take every input equally, seriously,
- 42:40and watch as it fries. Its brain on that.
- 42:45And another story from one of the respondents was how
- 42:50Microsoft's calls summarization tool can capture a surprising
- 42:55degree of detail while hilariously completely missing
- 43:01the main point of the meeting. So, it's able to get everything
- 43:06that you said, but then when it goes to add action items or talk
- 43:12about the main points of the meeting, it it strikes out and
- 43:18so there you have it. This was a little bit of a recap
- 43:22of the report that I'm trying to write right now.
- 43:24I just thought it would be nice to have it in podcast form if
- 43:28you are like me and you love podcasts, hopefully this has
- 43:31been quite useful to know about who is using large language
- 43:34models in production. What kind of use cases they are
- 43:37using them with if there's any special toolings what kind of
- 43:41questions are around that the challenges and concerns the
- 43:44major? Challenges and concerns, and the
- 43:48open questions, and opportunities that still can be
- 43:51fleshed out. Again, going back to those eight
- 43:54main points. Just so that you have them in
- 43:58the top of your mind. Common use cases, like text
- 44:01generation and summarization, or useful, but participants are
- 44:05going deeper. And they are exploring ways to
- 44:07use large language models for data enrichment with data,
- 44:11labeling augmentation, synthetic data creation, and Question
- 44:16generation my personal favorite number two decisions to use
- 44:20large language models within an organization is still unclear
- 44:23due to the high cost and unknown Roi.
- 44:27Remember the high costs are anything from serving cost to
- 44:32infrastructure cost to human costs resources.
- 44:37All of that it's just an unknown Roi right now and it is also not
- 44:43so clear how to prove out. Roi number three, you have the
- 44:47challenges around using large language models.
- 44:49Speed of inference, makes certain use cases, absolutely
- 44:54impossible. They are off the table for
- 44:57current infrastructure is not designed for these massive
- 45:01models. And there are a lot of
- 45:03workarounds and quick fixes one of my favorite responses to this
- 45:08was hey are you using any special tools?
- 45:12And someone put nope, just a bunch of shitty Scripts That I
- 45:15am not looking forward to refactoring.
- 45:18Number five is companies are building custom tooling to help
- 45:22with pains around output validation and prompt tracking
- 45:27and going along with this prompt tracking.
- 45:29For number 6, hallucinations present Real ethical and
- 45:34business concerns so much so that it's a showstopper for
- 45:39certain use cases and certain companies.
- 45:42Number seven is that there are larger question.
- 45:45Such as which part of the current workflows will be
- 45:48replaced versus, which parts will be augmented.
- 45:52And there is no Clarity around that whatsoever.
- 45:56And the last one is prompting and how, valuable of a skillet
- 46:01is. But even the best prompts cannot
- 46:06force. The models to give reliable
- 46:08output there. You have it.
- 46:10Hope you enjoyed this, very special edition of our large
- 46:14language. Dolls in production podcast.
- 46:18Join us on Thursday April 13. We've got over 33 speakers that
- 46:25are going to be there. And we're also doing two
- 46:29workshops all around using large language models in production.
- 46:34I think you're going to like it. If you liked this podcast if you
- 46:36made it this far come see us say hi.
- 46:40I'm going to be also doing a bunch of shenanigans and maybe
- 46:45Maybe playing a few songs that I can prompt the crowd to Give me
- 46:52lyrics for not chat GPT. All right, that's it.
- 46:56Have a great day, everyone.