HN user

hansonw

317 karma

Codex @ OpenAI

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansonwng/

Posts4
Comments27
View on HN

Rest assured that we are better at training models than naming them ;D

- New benchmark SOTAs with 77.9% on SWE-Bench-Verified, 79.9% on SWE-Lancer, and 58.1% on TerminalBench 2.0

- Natively trained to work across many hours across multiple context windows via compaction

- 30% more token-efficient at the same reasoning level across many tasks

Let us know what you think!

The ELI5 of the paper is that most "unlearning" methods can be regarded as adding some delta `w` to the parameters of the network, but most of `w` just gets "rounded away" during quantization (i.e. `quantize(X+w) ~= quantize(X)`). Pretty clever idea as a lot of cited methods explicitly optimize/regularize to keep `w` small to avoid degrading evaluation accuracy.

To your point, it does put into question the idea of whether these methods can actually be considered truly "unlearning" from an information-theoretic perspective (or if it is the equivalent of e.g. just putting `if (false)` around the still latent knowledge)

Prompt Caching 2 years ago

It’s probably more. Pretty conservatively, if the KV embedding dimension for each token is ~10K x 100 attention layers (this is roughly the scale of Llama3.1 405B) that’s already 1M 16-bit floats per token = 2MB. They have likely needed to implement some kind of KV compression (like DeepSeek) to make this even feasible.

Yes. But also note that the new function calling is actually “tool calling” where the model is also fine-tuned to expect and react to the output of the function (and there are various other nuances like being able to call multiple functions in parallel and matching up the outputs to function calls precisely).

When used in multi-turn “call/response” mode it actually does start to unlock some new capabilities.

Not the author, but really nice that they shared some real data points:

Once our Text-to-SQL solution was in production, we were also able to observe how users interacted with the system. As our implementation improved and as users became more familiar with the feature, our first-shot acceptance rate for the generated SQL increased from 20% to above 40%. In practice, most queries that are generated require multiple iterations of human or AI generation before being finalized. In order to determine how Text-to-SQL affected data user productivity, the most reliable method would have been to experiment. Using such a method, previous research has found that AI assistance improved task completion speed by over 50%. In our real world data (which importantly does not control for differences in tasks), we find a 35% improvement in task completion speed for writing SQL queries using AI assistance.

If you think about it, RAG is a relatively primitive “first pass attention layer” that is binary and semi-heuristic based. I think it’s fairly safe to say that in the long term RAG will be integrated into the model architecture somehow, just a matter of when :)

If sub-quadratic architectures (eg Mamba) become a thing, it will become feasible to precompute most of the work for a fixed prefix (i.e. system prompt) and the latency can be pretty minimal. Even with current transformers, if you have a fixed system prompt, you can save the KV cache and it helps a lot (though the inference time of each incremental token is still linear).

“RNN-mode inference” is also extremely exciting because you can precompute the hidden state of any prompt prefix (i.e. a long system prompt, or statically retrieved context) and continued generations pay the same cost irrespective of the prefix length.

Persimmon-8B 3 years ago

This is the best comparison I've found that benchmarks the current OSS inference solutions: https://hamel.dev/notes/llm/inference/03_inference.html

IME the streaming API in text-generation-inference works fine in production. (Though some of the other solutions may be better). I've used it with Starcoder (15B) and the time-to-first-token / tokens per second all seem quite reasonable out of the box.

Arcwise | https://arcwise.app | Engineering | Full-time | SF or Remote (US)

At Arcwise, we’re on a mission to make analytics and data science accessible to anybody - starting with spreadsheet users. We're big believers that the spreadsheet interface is still unmatched when working with tabular data, but spreadsheets just haven't evolved to match the rapid pace of the modern data world. To fix that, we're building a platform to supercharge the spreadsheet to keep up with today's business needs.

We're a seed-stage startup that just came out of Sequoia's Arc Americas program and are looking to hire a founding full-stack engineer; the founders were previously leaders at Flexport and Meta across business, engineering, and data science. Our tech stack is currently TypeScript/React + Python + Terraform and we're working with the latest advancements in the modern data stack (e.g. dbt's new semantic layer).

For more information, see https://hiring.arcwise.app or email your CV to hiring@arcwise.app

Sunsetting Atom 4 years ago

(Note: I worked on https://ide.atom.io and Facebook's Nuclide team).

On the topic of performance - one of the architecture decisions that VSCode nailed was the 'extension host' (https://code.visualstudio.com/api/advanced-topics/extension-...): all VSCode extensions are sandboxed in a child Node process, and can only communicate back with the main IDE process via the VSCode API. This has huge benefits for performance:

(1) extensions can never block editor startup. this was a huge problem for Atom as package loads were startup blocking and it wasn't uncommon to have multi-second startup times with lots of packages installed - especially due to the fact that JS packages typically repeat dependencies, resulting in tons of bloat. Also extension authors are rarely performance-conscious

(2) extension code can never block the core rendering thread, another huge problem in Atom - you'd often have stuttering/frame drops if extensions were doing blocking work on character or cursor changes, which was more often the case than not..

The tradeoff of course is that VSCode extensions are very limited in the set of UI customizations they can make but MS did a very good job of designing their APIs to be sufficiently extensible in this aspect (i.e. having APIs for extensions to hook into all core IDE features). Atom's extension ecosystem was much more fragmented resulting in dependency/versioning hell.

As a side note, another benefit of the extension host model is how it enables extensions to semi-magically work on remote filesystems (including inside WSL) without needing complete rewrites.

PyScript is built on top of Pyodide! But it's probably the first well-supported way to build frontend apps with it. I imagine the fact that Anaconda is backing PyScript means that there will be increased investment into Pyodide as well.