RAG to Riches

https://sourcegraph.com/blog/rag-to-riches

by sidcool • 3 years ago

150 72 3 years ago

gostsamo• 3 years ago

Extremely funny until it reached the product announcement part. Then it turns out, sourcegraph have their own code assistant with a nice inoffensive name which is of course better than anything that has came before. I haven't tried and can't comment on it, just pulled the rug under me in regard to the satire I was enjoying before that.

gloryjulio• 3 years ago

Everything is marketing, even the critiques of marketing

MichaelRo3• 3 years ago

> It’s more than just a fad; we’re in the craze phase, where putting "AI" in your company’s name gets VCs to just blatantly throw money your way.

It's not something new and predates ChatGPT by a long shot.

Some 10 years ago I was trying to market my trading system and the backtesting/simulation software that produced it and there was one and only one question that I was asked by a VC I got in contact with: "Is it AI?". I made the mistake to say "well, no.. plain mathematics". Never heard of them afterwards.

Now I'm soon going to market a new trading system and this time you know what I'll say that it consists of ;)

Incidentally I did work with "AI guys" trying to somehow drain some money out of the stock market using some form of magic. The approach is very "Lords Of The Rings" like, you don't need to know fundamentals, don't need a keen understanding of the processes and various instruments, because "the ring" knows. All you need to know is to spin the ring around your finger and make the wish "make money".

I never saw anything but bullshit coming out of these "AI in finance" but at the same time never saw but "great successes" reported by these guys twisting and twirling and tormenting the numbers in desperation to make them look profitable.

zith• 3 years ago

Indeed, it seems almost forgotten now, but between Web 2.0 and Blockchain, putting AI in your company description was for sure a valuation multiplier.

The current craze is magnitudes larger, of course, but we have not had an AI winter for a long time.

thaumasiotes4• 3 years ago

The approach is very "Lords Of The Rings" like, you don't need to know fundamentals, don't need a keen understanding of the processes and various instruments, because "the ring" knows. All you need to know is to spin the ring around your finger and make the wish "make money".

What's the similarity to Lord of the Rings? That sounds more like Aladdin.

MichaelRo3• 3 years ago

"Lord of the Rings" is just a convenient reference for this fairy story leitmotif: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_ring

I recall (very badly) having read some Carl Sagan's reflection on this and how the fact is the majority of people hold some form of "magical thinking" which is completely at odds with rationality and the scientific method. Basically all you need is acquire some form of "magic ring" and you can be the "magician". When in fact you are not, you only are the magician if you can forge the magic ring. And diagnose and repair it when it malfunctions.

But that's not what "AI finance" is about, that's classical finance. AI is the magic ring here, somehow magically "it" thinks and does so that you don't have to. You only spin the ring and enjoy the riches.

hiAndrewQuinn• 3 years ago

You can tell people everything you do is AI powered if you're using GPT-4 every day

highwaylights• 3 years ago

This has all happened before and will again.

In the 90’s you could prefix your company name with “e-“ or suffix it with “web”, or actually have the “.com” in the registered company name and your stock would immediately skyrocket.

(I’m not kidding or exaggerating - things got that OTT before the bubble burst).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

“As a result of these factors, many investors were eager to invest, at any valuation, in any dot-com company, especially if it had one of the Internet-related prefixes or a ‘.com’ suffix in its name.”

jowea• 3 years ago

And just in case you need more proof this is just the current year edition of an old thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_compliant#Examples

jaymzcampbell• 3 years ago

Similarly reminded me of the blockchain hype which you knew was just getting out of control when "On-Line PLC" by simply adding said word saw summarily a 4x increase in their share value over night (it's since fallen back to it's pre-2017 value range).

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...

rapnie• 3 years ago

Just saying the word "AI" and the ring may render you invisible. Put something in front to give it a "one ring to rule them all" ring, e.g. "Hyper AI".

maypop• 3 years ago

When someone asks “are you a god?”, You say YES!

Is what these AI conversations sound like to me.

angarg12• 3 years ago

There is always hustlers, but the current web of AI is undeniable.

I'm a ML Engineer and for the past few months I'm getting as much activity in LinkedIn as at the cusp of 2022 job market. In the startup space, I see 2 major trends:

1. Startups with the mission to solve problem X using AI.

2. Startups that solve problem X, but now are pivoting to AI.

The funniest case was this startup that was hiring for their founding ML team, and the recruiter simply couldn't tell me what this team was supposed to do.

dougSF70• 3 years ago

I have been in conversations with someone who wants to do something just like this. I shared with him this recent paper that suggests LSTM can produce better returns than the market. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/for.3021?af=R) . He will need simulation/back-testing system. Will yours be Cloud / Self-hosted / Open-source / Subscription based ?

MichaelRo3• 3 years ago

Open-Source, self-Hosted. Needs a computer, Java, PostgreSQL and some historical market data (which you usually need to purchase, at least options data).

sgift• 3 years ago

Big Data. Knowledge Engine. AI. Blockchain. Crypto. IoT. The only industry more driven by fashion than IT is .. the fashion industry. And even there it's a close race.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

Is this AI generated blogspam? It doesn't seem to have a point, it hallucinate things, and it was seemingly endless. This is nothing like their other blog posts.

dvaun• 3 years ago

Read it again—it's funny and reeking with sarcasm.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

I don't find it funny and it is a long winded and confusing way of saying that their code suggestions use other code and documentation and that people should try it.

Racing0461• 3 years ago

agreed. too much sarcasm for an hr friendly ai to generate.

lysecret4• 3 years ago

Ai is still far off from that level of witticism.

disgruntledphd2• 3 years ago

You should look up Steve Yegges earlier work. It's pretty glorious and definitely not AI.

toasteroven4567• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, this is how Steve Yegge communicates both in writing and real life. As someone who worked at Sourcegraph, it's very difficult to tolerate.

MarkLowenstein• 3 years ago

Hilarious writing by the Kingdom of Nouns guy. Dave Barry-esque.

lysecret4• 3 years ago

Context has graduated from “hey we have vector embeddings” to “hey we have a whole squad of engines.”

Everyone who’s building rags has to meditate on this.

lysecret4• 3 years ago

I have to admit. This is marketing done right. Same as the retool post.

Also, in the next few years all the sauce and moat of these kinds of systems will be in the retrieval architecture. I wish they would go into further detail (just a little bit at then end).

In any case great read! Might even give it a try.

intrepidsoldier2• 3 years ago

Details were left for the actual announcement blog post - https://sourcegraph.com/blog/cody-is-generally-available

Disclaimer: I work for Sourcegraph.

imjonse3• 3 years ago

Even though 'context' is mentioned many times in that post, I am still unsure if the power of Cody comes only if you import your repo in sourcegraph. It does not seem like using it within VSCode in your local source directory lets is understand and use everything there, but I am happy to be corrected.

intended• 3 years ago

Is whoever wrote that post, specifically, hiring?

karmasimida• 3 years ago

I miss the plot of the blog post

imjonse3• 3 years ago

This is written by a LLM pretrained on Steve's writings and then finetuned and made safe. A singe instance of "F-word" is the strongest it could muster.

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

The only question I have after reading this blog is whether they are hiring. Also, please dial down the John Oliver weights in your LLM settings unless you generate audio for your post with JohnAI narrating.

Completion Acceptance Rate may not be sufficient for measuring productivity but it does seem like a valuable measure of usefulness, although it can be useful due to accuracy at best but also laziness, carelessness, or ignorance. A manager who wants to reduce head count can interpret high-CAR programmers as among the lazy, careless or ignorant if so inclined.

Damn. You know this is going to happen.

wiredfool• 3 years ago

So, we also need the complimentary decline rate, because, as the bumper sticker says, my other CAR is a CDR.

_steve_yegge_• 3 years ago

I love this!

zomglings• 3 years ago

Genius comment, haven’t laughed like that in a while

living_room_pc2• 3 years ago

This is just spam. Mixed in with somethings we already knew.

Its marketing for a new AI assistant whatever. Waste of time.

jgalt212• 3 years ago

indeed. serious drivel, I'd expect from some third rate VC on twitter.

tesdinger• 3 years ago

It is a funny satirical piece of literature.

living_room_pc2• 3 years ago

I usually don't call marketing material literature.

Did you read the whole thing?

nerdponx• 3 years ago

It is a funny-ish piece of content marketing.

imperialdrive• 3 years ago

I found it pretty darn entertaining and got excited to support the writer before realizing it was (actually?) a clever ad? hah.

JabavuAdams• 3 years ago

I mean, I applied to SourceGraph for a Machine Learning Engineer role on Thursday, and all they gave me was a rejection, on Friday. Where's mah boat? Also, I have this awesome (aspirational) assistant / agent / coding helper thing that's open source and even has some comments so ... can I have a job?

nextworddev• 3 years ago

Hilarious to see how a VC backed AI startup tries to be funny and write a satire of other AI startups.

latchkey• 3 years ago

Have you met Yegge before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge

moffkalast• 3 years ago

In Korea, we found that in contrast to the West, they have a rich and vibrant hierarchical society that celebrates rank and status, and glorifies managers, which by the way is completely unrelated to our leadership team’s recent decision to hire only in Korea.

lmao

dbmikus• 3 years ago

Didn't realize that Steve Yegge is now at Sourcegraph! He created Kythe[1] at Google, so Sourcegraph makes sense for a place to be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Kythe

grahamgooch• 3 years ago

That was too long. Had AI summarize the article. Is this about right?

Here is a summary with some additional context:

1. AI competition is heating up, with companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc investing heavily and releasing new models. There is also a proliferation of AI startups raising large funding rounds. OpenAI fired then quickly rehired its CEO Sam Altman, causing confusion.

2. Machine learning engineers are in extremely high demand in the job market, receiving lavish recruiting offers. Meanwhile, other engineers like backend developers or mobile devs are struggling to move jobs since companies are mainly focused on security and ML hires. ML people get showered with "bear spray" level recruiting interest.

3. Most companies, even big Fortune 1000 brands, are still only in the initial stages of developing a concrete AI strategy and execution plans. There's a lot of "we're working on it" talk but not much to show yet. Companies are slow to focus on this due to inertia and competing internal priorities.

4. Metrics like "completion acceptance rate" (CAR) for coding assistants don't actually quantify developer productivity gains. However, some companies wrongly want to use CAR to closely monitor developers.

5. Cody, a new coding assistant from Sourcegraph using retrieval-augmented generation, leverages Sourcegraph's code search and understanding strengths. It is now generally available. Comments in code can improve Cody's understanding. Sourcegraph has developed Cody quickly thanks to its existing infrastructure.

emporas• 3 years ago

The proposition coding assistants like Copilot and Sourcegraph make, is that they can help in writing code for every programming language, and speed up a lot the process of software development. While this is true, i consider as a lot more relevant discussion, to talk about the end of software development [1]. The end, as in 98% percent will get automated very soon.

Every time i try to generate Rust code, all LLMs perform very good, while by trying to generate untyped code like Scheme, all of them perform okey-ish at best.

Better data can be produced for LLMs, like cargo-public-api to teach the machine about the api exposed and afterwards the code, as well as cargo-modules to teach the machine about the hierarchy of modules and only afterwards the code and so on.

Tricks like that, also mixture of experts architecture for LLMs to second think their response, will put an end to the coding soon. My point is, that coding assistants will not exist soon, because coding will be a thing of the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhCl-GeT4jw

paravz• 3 years ago

this type of marketing satire worked for me: 80% entertainment 20% substance

krashidov• 3 years ago

Has anyone here used Cody? Any thoughts or opinions on it?

imnot404• 3 years ago

I have been trying it with WebStorm. Pretty solid. The autocomplete is a little more accurate compared to Copilot. Not a fan of the chat and the fact that the VS Code extension has more features but whatever it's free for now.

swah• 3 years ago

Just tried again and I think it wasn't finishing indexing. Had to uninstall...

RAG to Riches

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