lambdaprompt VS genetic-programming

We're using all sorts of different stacks and tooling. We made our own tooling at one point (https://github.com/approximatelabs/lambdaprompt/), but have more recently switched to just using the raw requests ourselves and writing out the logic ourselves in the product. For our main product, the code just lives in our next app, and deploys on vercel.

https://github.com/approximatelabs/lambdaprompt It has served all of my personal use-cases since making it, including powering `sketch` (copilot for pandas) https://github.com/approximatelabs/sketch

Core things it does: Uses jinja templates, does sync and async, and most importantly treats LLM completion endpoints as "function calls", which you can compose and build structures around just with simple python. I also combined it with fastapi so you can just serve up any templates you want directly as rest endpoints. It also offers callback hooks so you can log & trace execution graphs.

All together its only ~600 lines of python.

I haven't had a chance to really push all the different examples out there, but most "complex behaviors", so there aren't many patterns to copy. But if you're comfortable in python, then I think it offers a pretty good interface.

I hope to get back to it sometime in the next week to introduce local-mode (eg. all the open source smaller models are now available, I want to make those first-class)

This is great~ There's been some really rapid progress on Text2SQL in the last 6 months, and I really thinking this will have a real impact on the modern data stack ecosystem!

I had similar success with lambdaprompt for solving Text2SQL (https://github.com/approximatelabs/lambdaprompt/)

This is great! I love seeing how rapidly in the past 6 months these ideas are evolving. I've been internally calling these systems "prompt machines". I'm a strong believer that chaining together language model prompts is core to extracting real, and reproducible value from language models. I sometimes even wonder if systems like this are the path to AGI as well, and spent a full month 'stuck' on that hypothesis in October.

Specific to prompt-chaining: I've spent a lot of time ideating about where "prompts live" (are they best as API endpoint, as cli programs, as machines with internal state, treated as a single 'assembly instruction' -- where do "prompts" live naturally) and eventually decided on them being the most synonymous with functions (and api endpoints via the RPC concept)

mental model I've developed (sharing in case it resonates with anyone else)

a "chain" is `a = 'text'; b = p1(a); c = p2(b)` where p1 and p2 are LLM prompts.

What comes next (in my opinion) is other programming constructs: loops, conditionals, variables (memory), etc. (I think LangChain represents some of these concepts as their "areas" -> chain (function chaining), agents (loops), memory (variables))

To offer this code-style interface on top of LLMs, I made something similar to LangChain, but scoped what i made to only focus on the bare functional interface and the concept of a "prompt function", and leave the power of the "execution flow" up to the language interpreter itself (in this case python) so the user can make anything with it.

https://github.com/approximatelabs/lambdaprompt

I've had so much fun recently just playing with prompt chaining in general, it feels like the "new toy" in the AI space (orders of magnitude more fun than dall-e or chat-gpt for me). (I built sketch (posted the other day on HN) based on lambdaprompt)

My favorites have been things to test the inherent behaviors of language models using iterated prompts. I spent some time looking for "fractal" like behavior inside the functions, hoping that if I got the right starting point, an iterated function would avoid fixed points --> this has eluded me so far, so if anyone finds non-fixed points in LLMs, please let me know!

I'm a believer that the "next revolution" in machine-written code and behavior from LLMs will come when someone can tame LLM prompting to self-write prompt chains themselves (whether that is on lambdaprompt, langchain, or something else!)

All in all, I'm super hyped about LangChain, love the space they are in and the rapid attention they are getting~

From https://github.com/approximatelabs/sketch/blob/main/sketch/p... it appears that this library is calling a remote API, which obviates the utility of the demonstrated use case.

Upon closer inspection, it looks like https://github.com/approximatelabs/sketch interfaces with the model via https://github.com/approximatelabs/lambdaprompt, which is made by the same organization. This suggests to me that the former may be a toy demonstration of the latter.

A couple of thoughts jumped out after reading this: transforms and meta-learning.

An old trick in AI is to transform the medium to Lisp because it can be represented as a syntax-free tree that always runs. In this case, working with SQL directly led to syntax errors which returned no results. It would probably be more fruitful to work with relational algebra and tuple relational calculus (I had to look that up hah) represented as Lisp and convert the final answer back to SQL. But I'm honestly impressed that ChatGPT's SQL answers mostly worked anyway!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

http://www.cis.umassd.edu/~ivalova/Spring08/cis412/Ectures/G...

https://www.gene-expression-programming.com/GepBook/Chapter1...

https://github.com/gdobbins/genetic-programming

I actually don't know how far things have come with meta-learning as far as AIs tuning their own hyperparameters. Well, a quick google search turned up this:

https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/training/docs/hyperpara...

So I would guess that this is the secret sauce that's boosted AI to such better performance in the last year or two. It's always been obvious to do that, but it requires a certain level of computing power to be able to run trainings thousands of times to pick the best learners.

Anyway, my point is that the author is doing the above steps semi-manually, but AIs are beginning to self-manage. Recursion sounds like a handy term to convey that. ChatGPT is so complex compared to what he is doing that I don't see any reason why it couldn't take his place too! And with so many eyeballs on this stuff, we probably only have a year or two before AI can do it all.

I'm regurgitating 20 year old knowledge here as an armchair warrior. Insiders are so far beyond this. But see, everything I mentioned is so much easier to understand than neural networks, that there's no reason why NNs can't use these techniques themselves. The hard work has already been done, now it's just plug n chug.