hamilton VS tree-of-thought-llm

Note that this uses simple OpenAI calls — you can replace this with Langchain, LlamaIndex, Hamilton (or something else) if you prefer more abstraction, and delegate to whatever LLM you like to use. And, you should probably use something a little more concrete (E.G. instructor) to guarantee output shape.

In this post, we’ll show how your team can turn any utility function(s) into reusable IPython Jupyter magics for a better notebook experience. As an example, we’ll use Hamilton, my open source library, to motivate the creation of a magic that facilitates better development ergonomics for using it. You needn’t know what Hamilton is to understand this post.

We built an app with it -- https://blog.dagworks.io/p/building-a-lightweight-experiment. You can see the code here https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton/blob/main/hamilton/....

Usually we've been prototyping with streamlit, but found that at times to be clunky. FastUI still has rough edges, but we made it work for our lightweight app.

This library is old news? Is there anything new that they've added that's noteworthy to take it for another spin?

[disclaimer I'm a maintainer of Hamilton] Otherwise FYI Prophet gels well with https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton for setting up your features and dataset for fitting & prediction[/disclaimer].

I had been hearing these pains from Langchain users for quite a while. Suffice to say I think:

1. too many layers of OO abstractions are a liability in production contexts. I'm biased, but a more functional approach is a better way to model what's going on. It's easier to test, wrap a function with concerns, and therefore reason about.

2. as fast as the field is moving, the layers of abstractions actually hurt your ability to customize without really diving into the details of the framework, or requiring you to step outside it -- in which case, why use it?

Otherwise I definitely love the small amount of code you need to write to get an LLM application up with Langchain. However you read code more often than you write it, in which case this brevity is a trade-off. Would you prefer to reduce your time debugging a production outage? or building the application? There's no right answer, other than "it depends".

To that end - we've come up with a post showing how one might use Hamilton (https://github.com/dagWorks-Inc/hamilton) to easily create a workflow to ingest data into a vector database that I think has a great production story. https://open.substack.com/pub/dagworks/p/building-a-maintain...

Note: Hamilton can cover your MLOps as well as LLMOps needs; you'll invariably be connecting LLM applications with traditional data/ML pipelines because LLMs don't solve everything -- but that's a post for another day.

This is me. I drive an open source library Hamilton that people doing time-series/ML work love to use. I'm building a paid product around it at DAGWorks, and I'm after feedback on our current version. Can I entice anyone to:

From a nuts and bolts perspective, I've been thinking of building some reactivity on top of https://github.com/dagworks-inc/hamilton (author here) that could get at this. (If you have a use case that could be documented, I'd appreciate it.)

Most people don't track lineage because it's difficult (though if you use something like https://github.com/DAGWorks-Inc/hamilton to write your pipeline - author here - it can come almost for free).

[2305.10601] Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (arxiv.org)

Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role. To surmount these challenges, we introduce a new framework for language model inference, “Tree of Thoughts” (ToT), which generalizes over the popular “Chain of Thought” approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (“thoughts”) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving. ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices. Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities on three novel tasks requiring non-trivial planning or search: Game of 24, Creative Writing, and Mini Crosswords. For instance, in Game of 24, while GPT-4 with chain-of-thought prompting only solved 4% of tasks, our method achieved a success rate of 74%. Code repo with all prompts: https://github.com/princeton-nlp/tree-of-thought-llm.

GPU utilization should be down when using this technique. I’m hoping this could allow for more efficient batch inference on GPUs. If you can predict 10 tokens for the price of 1 it should allow you to do tree of thought much more efficiently.

https://github.com/princeton-nlp/tree-of-thought-llm

For those familiar with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, the current LLMs (such as GPT-4 via ChatGPT) seem to resemble System 1 thinking (near-instantaneous, automatic, intuitive processes like next-word prediction). However, they lack System 2 thinking (slow, effortful, logical, planning, reasoning). What I learned today is that Google's Gemini (an LLM in training now) not only has more modalities (I think all Youtube Video and audio??), more compute, and almost twice the training data, but they're building in AlphaGo-type learning, which resembles tree of thoughts and looks a LOT like the missing puzzle piece of System 2 thinking. Will it be AGI? Maybe, and it's coming this winter.

Tree of thoughts: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10601

Good video on "Tree of thoughts" which also reviews / puts it in the context of other methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut5kp56wW_4

Completion vs conversational interface is something you can read about in the OpenAI API documentation.

For the remaining things I don't have single specific pointer at hand.

What do you think about the combination of Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models LongNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000,000,000 Tokens Textbooks Are All You Need Attention Is All You Need Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation

You are right. Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models proposes to solve this via MCTS-style generation (similar to how AlphaGo worked, and a lot of planning & control problems are executed).

The transformer was developed in 2017 and it powers all modern LLMs. If you're familiar with Daniel Kahneman's work from Thinking Fast and Slow, you could easily summarize LLMs as excellent System 1 thinking: our fast, automatic, unconscious responses (e.g. autocomplete). I'd argue that we're one development (similar to the transformer) away from creating System 2 thinking: deliberate and strategic thinking. In fact, with merely GPT-4 and some clever architectures, researchers have developed chain-of-thought prompting and, more recently, tree-of-thoughts reasoning. While external to the LLM architecture, embedding these concepts into a LLM could very likely solve the creation of System 2 thinking and produce the first real AGI. Adding more modalities (e.g. audio, images, video, topography, etc.) will simply add more nuance in the weights and biases of a complete system.

There are a bunch of other methods to improve quality and performance like tree-of-thought-llm, connecting a LLM to a database or have it review its own output.