dspy VS playground

Legal practitioners often need to find specific cases and clauses across thousands of dense documents. While traditional keyword-based search techniques are useful, they fail to fully capture semantic content of queries and case files. Vector search engines and large language models provide an intriguing alternative. In this talk, I will show you how to build a legal search application using the DSPy framework and the Milvus vector search engine.

I’ve observed that Pydantic - which we’ve used for years in our API stack - has become very popular in LLM applications, for its type-adjacent features. It serves as a foundational technology for prompting libraries like [DSPy](https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy) which are abstracting “up the stack” of LLM apps. (some opinions there)

Operating AI apps reveals a big challenge, in that debugging probabilistic code paths requires more than the usual introspective abilities, and in an environment where function calls can have very real monetary impact we have to be able to see what’s happening in the runtime. See LangChain’s hosted solution (can’t recall the name) that allows an operator to see prompts and responses “on the wire”. (It just occurred to me that Langchain and Pydantic have a lot in common here, in approach.)

Having a coupling between Pydantic - which is *just about* the data layer itself - and an observability tool seems very interesting to me, and having this come from the folks who built it does not seem unreasonable. WRT open source and monetization, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried - given the recent few months - but I am choosing to see this in a positive light, given this team’s “believability weight” (to overuse Dalio) and history of delivering solid and really useful tooling.

DSPy is the best tool for optimizing prompts [0]: https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Think of it as a meta-prompt optimizer, it uses a LLM to optimize your prompts, to optimize your LLM.

Isn’t this just a very naive implementation of what DsPY does?

https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

I don’t understand what is exceptional here.

Have you done any comparison with DSPy ? (https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy)

Feels very similiar to DSPy except you dont have optimizations yet. But I like your API and the programming model your are enforcing through this.

I'm interested in hearing if anyone has used DSPy (https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy) just for prompt optimization for GPT-3.5 or GPT-4. Was it worth the effort and much better than manual prompt iteration? Was the optimized prompt some weird incantation? Any other insights?

You should check out x.com/lateinteraction's DSPy — which is like an optimizer for prompts — https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Not the parent, but NNs typically work better when you can't linearize your data. For classification, that means a space in which hyperplanes separate classes, and for regression a space in which a linear approximation is good.

For example, take the circle dataset here: https://playground.tensorflow.org

That doesn't look immediately linearly separable, but since it is 2D we have the insight that parameterizing by radius would do the trick. Now try doing that in 1000 dimensions. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't or do want to bother.

For visualisation and some fun: http://playground.tensorflow.org/

https://seeing-theory.brown.edu/

https://www.3blue1brown.com/

https://playground.tensorflow.org/

There’s an interactive neural network you can train here, which can give some intuition on wider vs larger networks:

https://mlu-explain.github.io/neural-networks/

See also here:

http://playground.tensorflow.org/

This site is worth playing around with to get a feel for neural networks, and somewhat about ML in general. There are lots of strategies for statistical learning, and neural nets are only one of them, but they essentially always boil down into figuring out how to build a “classifier”, to try to classify data points into whatever category they best belong in.

I don’t know much experimenting you’ve done, but many repeated small scale experiments might give you a better intuition at least. I highly recommend this online tool for playing with different environmental variables, even if you’re comfortable coding up your own experiments: http://playground.tensorflow.org

Even if you can’t code, play around with this tool: https://playground.tensorflow.org — you can adjust the shape of the NN and watch how well it classifies the data. Model size obviously matters.

I don't think so. You can easily play around in the browser, using Javascript, or on https://processing.org/, https://playground.tensorflow.org/, https://scratch.mit.edu/, etc.

If anything the problem is that today's kids have too many options. And sure, some are commercial.

Well there is no point of using a multilayer linear neural network, because a cascade of linear transformations can be reduced to a single linear transformation. So you can only approximate linear functions. However if you have prior knowledge about the non linearity of your data lets say you know that it is a linear combination of polynomials up to certain degree, you can expand your input space by explicitly making non linear transformation. For instance a 1D linear regression can be modeled by 2 input neurons and 1 output neuron where the activation of the output is the identity. The input neuron x0 will take a constant input namely 1 and the second input neuron x1 will takes your data x. The output neuron will be y=w_0 * 1+w_1 *x which is equal to y=w_0 +w_1 * x. Let us say that your data follows a polynomial form, the idea is to add input neurons and expand your input to for instance X=[1 x x2] in this case you have 3 input neurons where the third is an explict non linear form of the input so y=w_0 + w_1 x +w_2 x2. The general idea is to find a space where the problem becomes linear. In real life example these spaces are non trivial the power of neural network is that they can find by optimization such space without explicitly encoding these non linearities. Try playing around with https://playground.tensorflow.org/ you can get an intuition about your question.