[nomand]

Is it possible for such local install to retain conversation history so if for example you're working on a project and use it as your assistance across many days that you can continue conversations and for the model to keep track of what you and it already know?

[simonw]

My LLM command line tool can do that - it logs everything to a SQLite database and has an option to continue a conversation: https://llm.datasette.io

[jmiskovic]

There is no fully built solution, only bits and pieces. I noticed that llama outputs tend to degrade with amount of text, the text becomes too repetitive and focused, and you have to raise the temperature to break the model out of loops.

[nomand]

Does what you're saying mean you can only ask questions and get answers in a single step, and that having a long discussion where refinement of output is arrived at through conversation isn't possible?

[krisoft]

My understanding is that at a high level you can look at this model as a black box which accepts a string and outputs a string.

If you want it to “remember” things you do that by appending all the previous conversations together and supply it in the input string.

In an ideal world this would work perfectly. It would read through the whole conversation and would provide the right output you expect, exactly as if it would “remember” the conversation. In reality there are all kind of issues which can crop up as the input grows longer and longer. One is that it takes more and more processing power and time for it to “read through” everything previously said. And there are things like what jmiskovic said that the output quality can also degrade in perhaps unexpected ways.

But that also doesn’t mean that “ refinement of output is arrived at through conversation isn't possible”. It is not that black and white, just that you can run into troubles as the length of the discussion grows.

I don’t have direct experience with long conversations so I can’t tell you how long is definietly too long, and how long is still safe. Plus probably there are some tricks one can do to work around these. Probably there are things one can do if one unpacks that “black box” understanding of the process. But even without that you could imagine a “consolidation” process where the AI is instructed to write short notes about a given length of conversation and then those shorter notes would be copied in to the next input instead of the full previous conversation. All of these are possible, but you won’t have a turn-key solution for it just yet.

[cjbprime]

The limit here is the "context window" length of the model, measured in tokens, which will quickly become too short to contain all of your previous conversations, which will mean it has to answer questions without access to all of that text. And within a single conversation, it will mean that it starts forgetting the text from the start of the conversation, once the [conversation + new prompt] reaches the context length.

The kind of hacks that work around this are to train the model on the past conversations, and then rely on similarity in tensor space to pull the right (lossy) data back out of the model (or a separate database) later, based on its similarity to your question, and include it (or a summary of it, since summaries are smaller) within the context window for your new conversation, combined with your prompt. This is what people are talking about when they use the term "embeddings".

[nomand]

My benchmark is having a peer programming session spanning days and dozens of queries with ChatGPT where we co-created a custom static site generator that works really well for my requirements. It was able to hold context for a while and not "forget" what code it provided me dozens of messages earlier, it was able to "remember" corrections and refactors that I gave it and overall was incredibly useful for working out things like recurrence for folder hierarchies and building data trees. This kind and similar use-cases where memory is important, when the model is used as a genuine assistant.

[krisoft]

Excelent! That sounds like a very usefull personal benchmark then. You could test llama v2 by copying in different lengths of snippets from that conversation and checking how usefull you find its outputs.

[knodi123]

llama is just an input/output engine. It takes a big string as input, and gives a big string of output.

Save your outputs if you want, you can copy/paste them into any editor. Or make a shell script that mirrors outputs to a file and use that as your main interface. It's up to the user.