emerging-trajectories VS hn-search

I think LLMs can do a lot more than people assume, but they need to be given the proper frameworks.

When was the last time a researcher, economist, etc. was given 10,000 papers and simply told "do some original work"? That's not how it works. Daniel (the author) provides some good examples where _streamlined_ work can happen, but again, this is pretty basic stuff.

To push this further, though, imagine LLMs that fill in frameworks... A few steps here: (1) do a lit review, (2) fill in the framework, (3) discuss what might be missing, and maybe even try and fill in the missing information.

I'm doing something like this with politics and economics (see: https://emergingtrajectories.com/) and it works generally well. I think with a ton more engineering, curating of knowledge bases, etc., one can get these LLMs to actually find some new "nuggets" of information.

Admittedly, it's very hard, but I think there's something there.

RAG will have a place in the LLM world, since it's a way to obtain data/facts/info for relevant queries.

Since you asked about alternatives...

(a) "World models" where LLMs structure information into code, structured data, etc. and query those models will likely be a thing. AlphaGeometry uses this[1], and people have tried to abstract this in different ways[2].

(b) Depending on how you define RAG, knowledge graphs could be a form of RAG or alternatively an alternative to them. Companies like Elemental Cognition[3] are building distinct alternatives to RAG that use such graphs and give LLMs the ability to run queries on said graphs. Another approach here is to build "fact databases" where, you structure observations about the world into standalone concepts/ideas/observations and reference those[4]. Again, similar to RAG but not quite RAG as we know it today.

[1] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olymp...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.12672

[3] https://ec.ai/

[4] https://emergingtrajectories.com/

For those interested in using search-augmented "reasoning", I implemented something similar in Emerging Trajectories[1], an open source package that forecasts geopolitical and economic events. We extract facts[2] from various websites (Google searches, news articles, RSS feeds) and have the LLM generate a hypothesis on a metric.

We're tracking the info forecasts to see how well this does for future events. For example, we're pitting the LLMs against each other to predict March 2024 CPI[3].

[1] https://emergingtrajectories.com/

[2] Sample code: https://github.com/wgryc/emerging-trajectories/blob/main/eme...

[3] https://emergingtrajectories.com/a/statement/28

I'm working on research agents to help with economic, financial, and political research. These agents are open source (see: https://github.com/wgryc/emerging-trajectories).

The use cases are pretty straight forward and low risk:

1. Run a Google web search.

2. Query a news API.

3. Write a document based on the above, while citing sources.

Here's an example of something written yesterday, where I'm forecasting whether July 2024 will be the hottest on record: https://emergingtrajectories.com/a/forecast/74

This is working well in that the writeups are great and there are some "aha" moments, like the agent finding and referencing the The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)... Very cool! I wouldn't have thought of it.

Then there's the part where the agent also tells me that the Oregon Department of Transportation has holidays during the summer, which doesn't matter at all.

So, YMMV, as they say... But I am more productive with these agents. I wouldn't publish anything formally without confirming and reviewing the content, though.

LLM agents to forecast geopolitical and economic events.

- Site: https://emergingtrajectories.com/

- GitHub repo: https://github.com/wgryc/emerging-trajectories

I've helped a number of companies build various sorts of LLM-powered apps (chatbots mainly) and found it interesting but not incredibly inspiring. The above is my attempt to build something no one else is working on.

It's been a lot of fun. Not sure if it'll be a "thing" ever, but I enjoy it.

- Ads with Psychological tricks

Truly good websites have around 2 facts per 10 word sentence, and get instantly to the chase. Also: good websites give you the names of all their competitors/alternative websites before showing their own stuff, and give you further reading.

Right now the world of technology is supposedly more innovative than ever, but somehow Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/) and Search Hackernews (https://hn.algolia.com/) beat billion dollar search engines.

Articles written decades ago are still unsurpassed in terms of quality and ease of understanding, but the best modern websites can do is textbook explanations. It is time society graduates from boilerplate buzzword textbook culture.

Now the gems of the internet are slowly being buried beneath mountains of trash.

If something sounds boilerplate it isn't good enough.

Don't bother saying something that has been said before, and better.

>for more detail: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oh, I see. We actually discussed Pound about four years ago - just a little back and forth about the ABC of Reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24196681

>What's your explanation of why Pound went Fascist?

I'm not sure I particularly have one; I haven't read any of his longer political or cultural (i.e. non-literary) works. I just think it's silly to correlate an approach to translation that you dislike with fascism. Especially as I'm not sure it even makes sense on its own terms: I can only read your comment as 'lazy translator? Figures that he would be a fascist', but if I imagine the type of translation a fascist would approve of, the approach I picture is fastidious, fussy, concerned with fidelity to the point of stickler-ishness. (Isn't that from where we get 'grammar nazi'?)

And oh, well, since you ask I'll take a shy at it: my vague sense is that he became fascist because saw a society in decline due to it becoming more and more a sham society: opulence without virtue, power without vigour, money no longer tied to actually existing goods. (Of course, all of this shades easily into antisemitism.) He saw fascism as the answer; It's easier to see in retrospect that it wasn't.

"multiplayer notepad" goes back 15 years at least - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... notepad&sort=byDate&type=comment

it was used back with a popular website which opened a text document and anyone viewing could type, but I can't remember the name. That became a thing in Google Docs, Microsoft Office, Floobits, and lots of self-hosted and cloned sites.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

I understand the reason for repeating these sentiments—it's the same reason why they get upvoted to the top of threads*—but repetition of this kind is what we're most trying to avoid here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* I've marked this one off topic now.

I was looking for it in the guidelines. There are a couple of conventions for postings. Consider a bit of prior examples: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=show+hn]

yeah there are only three stories coming up from the site search

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgres+clustering

only one is semanthically correct, the other pick up the wrong version of clustering (i.e. k-means instead of multi master writes)

but yeah if one doesn't test the hard cases, how does one know it preserves semantics :D

Like dismissing the work of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein without seemingly having read either:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...