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_jayhack_

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Deep Learning is a Black Box and Here's Why You Should Use Random Forests Because They Are Interpretable

This was the mantra of applied machine learning c. 2010 - 2024 for anyone paying attention. No longer the case.

As the author - this was adapted from a thread posted on X in March (linked in article). AI did the adaptation, I wrote the original article. It seems like it inserted grammatically correct hyphens, otherwise the copy is mine.

Hello, I am the author - this is not an LLM-generated article, I wrote this by hand and had an LLM adapt it from a thread on X. You can see the original thread here: https://x.com/mathemagic1an/status/2035850046735098065

the fact that language models have human-interpretable representations and neurons has been known since BERT... Circuits research also does not come from Anthropic... The article does not claim Anthropic invented the field, rather that they have had important contributions to it. This is intended as an overview into a specific set of ideas that are working for mechanistic interpretability. Not a formal literature review.

Would love to understand how you compare to other providers like Modal, Daytona, Blaxel, E2B and Vercel. I think most other agent builders will have the same question. Can you provide a feature/performance comparison matrix to make this easier?

static analysis tools that produce flowcharts and diagrams like this have existed since antiquity, and I'm not seeing any new real innovation other than "letting the LLM produce it".

Inherent limitation of static analysis-only visualization tools is lack of flexibility/judgement on what should and should not be surfaced in the final visualization.

The produced visualizations look like machine code themselves. Advantage of having LLMs produce code visualizations is the judgement/common sense on the resolution things should be presented at, so they are intuitive and useful.

Vector embedding is not an invention of the last decade. Featurization in ML goes back to the 60s - even deep learning-based featurization is decades old at a minimum. Like everything else in ML this became much more useful with data and compute scale

Very cool and interesting project. Ideas like this are a threat to traditionally-conceived project management platforms like Linear; that being said, Linear and others (Monday, ClickUp, etc.) are pushing aggressively into UX built for human/AI collaboration. I guess the question is how quickly they can execute and how many novel features are required to properly bring AI into the human project workspace

This does not take into account the fact that experienced developers working with AI have shifted into roles of management and triage, working on several tasks simultaneously.

Would be interesting (and in fact necessary to derive conclusions from this study) to see aggregate number of tasks completed per developer with AI augmentation. That is, if time per task has gone up by 20% but we clear 2x as many tasks, that is a pretty important caveat to the results published here

Codemodder has extensive Java support, which Codegen does not support at the moment. Otherwise, my understanding of Codemodder is that it is focused on AST-level syntactical modifications. Codegen computes a richer graph datastructure, and this can be used for sophisticated modifications that depend on inheritance hierarchies, function usages, cross-file references and more.

Codemodder is written in Java, whereas you can write Codegen in a jupyter notebook or anywhere you can run Python.

Unfortunately a lot of the things we want agents to interact with don't expose neat APIs. Computer use and, eventually, physical locomotion are necessary for unlocking agent interactivity with the real world.

If you think the purpose of pure math is to provide employment and entertainment to mathematicians, this is a dark day.

If you believe the purpose of pure math is to shed light on patterns in nature, pave the way for the sciences, etc., this is fantastic news.

We do advanced static analysis to provide programmatic access to the type system, etc., based on tree-sitter and in-house tech.

This enables APIs such as `function.call_sites`, `symbol.usages`, `class.parent_classes`, and more!

Interesting refactor!

This is trivial with codegen.com. Syntax below:

  # Iterate through all files in the codebase
  for file in codebase.files:
      # Check for functions with the pytest.fixture decorator
      for function in file.functions:
          if any(d.name == "fixture" for d in function.decorators):
              # Rename the 'db' parameter to 'database'
              db_param = function.get_parameter("db")
              if db_param:
                  db_param.set_name("database")
                  # Log the modification
                  print(f"Modified {function.name}")
Live example: https://www.codegen.sh/codemod/4697/public/diff

This logic only applies to generative pre-training, behavior cloning, and other training methods which rely on learning to mimic well-structured content from the real world.

It does not apply to intelligence gathered through methods like RL.

How does the author think about the intelligence of AlphaGo, for instance, which was trained entirely by self-play?

Hey all, I hacked this out this afternoon after getting access to the ChatGPT Plugins API.

Right now, it integrates code & issues from a repo in a format that ChatGPT can easily navigate.

It can summarize/create issues for you, help you debug while looking at your code (without the copy/paste), etc.

Would appreciate any feedback. What other features do you want to see?