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by krychu 1081 days ago
Using an LLM framework at this moment doesn’t make sense and can be damaging, in my humble opinion. Ways to extract value from LLMs are in early exploration stage. Look at research in prompting: chain of thought, react, reflection, tree of thoughts, zero vs few hot etc. Then completion vs conversational interfacing. Then memory management via vector databases and prompt expansion vs compression vs progressive summarization etc. All these are fairly recent developments. They are not abstractions worth cementing, this is search and creative phase. LLMs threw everything in the air, but the dust is far from settling. I think it’s important to recognize the phase we’re in and pick your weapon accordingly. You have to stay nimble and light, ready to experiment with a new idea that will come out next week. You should be hacking these things together by yourself. If you pick a framework at this stage know that the framework will have to pay the price of trying to cement things in the times of storm. And you’ll be a few steps behind. Of course this is my personal take.
1 comments

> Look at research in prompting: chain of thought, react, reflection, tree of thoughts, zero vs few hot etc. Then completion vs conversational interfacing. Then memory management via vector databases and prompt expansion vs compression vs progressive summarization etc.

Wow, that's a list of things that's completely new to me - thanks! Do you have any particular resources that you'd recommend for learning about these different topics?

Chain of thought: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 ReAct: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629 Reflexion: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366 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.

Would also love to see resources!