[HN Gopher] AI Workbooks - A notebook interface for LLMs, image ...
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       AI Workbooks - A notebook interface for LLMs, image and audio
       models
        
       Author : Flux159
       Score  : 172 points
       Date   : 2023-06-21 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lastmileai.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lastmileai.dev)
        
       | tarasglek wrote:
       | I think there is some interesting interface exploration to do in
       | "freaking ai, give me what I want even if i'm not yet sure what I
       | want" interfaces.
       | 
       | In our open source chatcraft.org we focused on retrying with
       | different openai(for now) models.
       | https://github.com/tarasglek/chatcraft.org/pull/99#issuecomm...
        
       | scg wrote:
       | Does it pick up context from previous cells like Wolfram's Chat
       | Notebooks?
       | 
       | https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/06/introducing-chat...
        
         | Flux159 wrote:
         | ChatGPT and PaLM Chat cells do take context from previous cells
         | of the same type (we don't mix messages between them to avoid
         | confusion).
         | 
         | For something like Stable Diffusion it doesn't make much sense
         | where the prompt is going to be isolated.
         | 
         | This was something that we took into account while building and
         | designing workbooks - how will normal users expect a notebook
         | interface to work with chat style models.
        
       | naira_g wrote:
       | It's amazing!
        
       | saqadri wrote:
       | Hey folks! I'm Sarmad from the LastMile AI team. We'd love your
       | feedback on this as you try it out. Here's a video example of
       | using AI Workbooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19vRQQNZLFo
       | 
       | Example Workbook from the video:
       | https://lastmileai.dev/workbooks/clj530sqs000znztcmd5qr7v6
        
         | morgango wrote:
         | Any thoughts on integrations with vector stores?
        
           | saqadri wrote:
           | We already support vector stores! If you go to
           | https://lastmileai.dev/models, you can New > "Tune new
           | model", which under the covers creates embeddings for your
           | data (either file upload or scraped from a website). You get
           | a new "Model Fork" from this, which you can then use in a
           | Workbook.
           | 
           | We're working on more complex scenarios with vector stores,
           | including API integrations.
        
         | interestfinance wrote:
         | It looks pretty nicely integrated. Have you considered
         | providing plugins for Jupyter notebooks? I would love to
         | integrate this into my workflow but all my work is typically
         | done in self hosted Jupyter notebooks.
        
           | saqadri wrote:
           | We are working on that at the moment! We currently have a
           | Python SDK that can be imported into a Jupyter notebook for
           | more advanced scenarios (https://github.com/lastmile-
           | ai/lastmileai-python).
           | 
           | We are working on updating the SDK for more advanced
           | scenarios (e.g. running bulk evaluations, comparing different
           | workbooks programmatically, etc.). Are there any specific
           | workflows you'd like to see enabled in self-hosted Jupyter
           | notebooks?
        
         | 0xBABAD00C wrote:
         | This looks great! What are some of the verticals you think this
         | will be most immediately applicable in, and are you integrating
         | with any? I am thinking a lot of ads/marketing work can be
         | jump-started with these notebooks.
        
           | saqadri wrote:
           | We'd love to see how people use them to understand that
           | better. Our initial hypothesis is that AI Workbooks fit that
           | sweet spot where a chat interface isn't enough, and a Jupyter
           | notebook is too heavyweight. So most likely this will be
           | helpful for technical users and teams who want to
           | experiment/prototype, and collaborate on the results.
           | 
           | Ads/marketing is definitely one vertical, but even for prompt
           | engineering in other verticals we can see this be valuable.
           | 
           | We're especially excited about the multi-modal usecases where
           | you chain multiple models together, but would like the
           | community feedback direct our product direction.
        
       | narenarya wrote:
       | That's great Lastmile. To add, we at Vidura (https://vidura.ai)
       | are taking user experience next level beyond notebooks and
       | workbooks. Not everyone is a Python developer (Ex: marketing),
       | and everyone should have easy access to generative AI.
       | 
       | Vidura manages all your prompts (Text, Image, and Audio (coming
       | soon)) in one place by providing an easy and navigable UI. It
       | also provides dynamic prompt templating (from UI, yes you heard
       | it right). HN, go check it out, and you won't disappoint.
       | 
       | https://vidura.ai
        
       | mkmk wrote:
       | Very nice! We've been using something very similar that we built
       | in Streamlit, and it's been incredibly helpful for enabling non-
       | dev employees to do some pretty sophisticated work with AI.
       | 
       | Genuinely excited to see these types of tools take off.
        
         | saqadri wrote:
         | We agree! Curious what you've seen with Streamlit -- what kind
         | of workflows are people finding most valuable? We are looking
         | for feedback for future product direction.
        
       | howon92 wrote:
       | I'm curious what the key advantages of AI Workbooks are compared
       | to doing the work on Jupyter Notebooks!
        
         | Flux159 wrote:
         | We love Jupyter notebooks, I was tech lead of an entire
         | platform around them in a previous job - but we wanted to
         | differentiate from Jupyter a bit by not being python first.
         | 
         | For AI Workbooks, we thought that the interface is natural
         | language & standard files (images, audio) that people interact
         | with everyday. This makes it much easier for non-developers to
         | get started.
         | 
         | For developers, we also support a python SDK so that you can
         | make a workbook from python or a Jupyter notebook using some
         | simple API endpoints. We're going to keep improving the SDK to
         | improve the integrations too.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | akisej wrote:
       | Pretty interface, although I remain unconvinced of how I'd
       | actually use it. If I'm just prototyping for myself, LLM
       | providers offer a decent history, and I rarely need to share
       | notebook-style explorations of LLMs with my team. For production
       | use cases at logicloop.com/ai we just add our prompts into code.
       | 
       | What's the use case you're envisioning people using AI notebooks
       | for?
        
       | jesussilva24 wrote:
       | This is cool!
        
       | cornercasechase wrote:
       | I notice that the python community seems to love
       | workbooks/notebooks but I have to say as a non-python dev, they
       | drive me up the wall. I just want to deal with "regular" code and
       | not have an entire gui environment with code and text
       | intermingling somewhere in the cloud.
       | 
       | I think AI really needs a de-pythoning in general.
        
         | erichocean wrote:
         | Checkout Clerk from the Clojure community [0]. Presumably it
         | would be possible to extend a new language like Mojo (Python-
         | superset) to support that kind of dev workflow to AI.
         | 
         | [0] https://github.com/nextjournal/clerk
        
         | thedudeabides5 wrote:
         | Agreed, let's bury the secrets of technological consciousness
         | in even more opaque and hard to read layers of code.
        
         | flakiness wrote:
         | Please don't mix up python and notebook. The linked product is
         | not even python! It's barely a variation of ChatGPT Web UI. And
         | many python people love VS code too! It's a vast community with
         | many different tastes.
         | 
         | That's said - As LLMs move "AI" field from self-hosted to
         | managed, the surrounding API ecosystem seems to move away from
         | Python, even though slowly. For example LangChain has both
         | Python and JS implementations. So De-pythoning is kind of
         | happening.
        
         | sledgehammers wrote:
         | > I think AI really needs a de-pythoning in general.
         | 
         | Yes, absolutely. The state of the Python ecosystem is what
         | remains after a nuclear apocalypse.
         | 
         | We need more native stuff, ggml.cpp for one is a super
         | important project.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | People say that, but ironically most everyone that uses it
           | just goes with the python wrapper for llama.cpp lol.
           | Everything except kobold anyway.
        
         | chaxor wrote:
         | It's a good way of separating useless crap from good code.
         | 
         | If the main code is in a notebook, ignore it completely.
         | 
         | If the code is in python but no ipynb, it _may_ be useful.
         | 
         | If it's a well structured code base, and there are some ipynb
         | files, check it out and determine if it's good software. Then
         | the ipynb files are like only a few lines, but show decent
         | plots and the package may end up being useful. Python _can_ be
         | good, it 's just unfortunately less and less likely due to far
         | too many idiots using it.
         | 
         | At least it's not R though.
        
         | herval wrote:
         | The amount of critical production code that's straight up
         | copy+paste from notebooks is pretty jarring too. Lots of pasta
         | and lots of extraneous libraries (like gradio) all over the
         | place
        
       | modo_ wrote:
       | This looks cool! Is it possible to feed the output of one cell
       | into the input of the next? That would really unlock the value of
       | a tool like this for me.
        
         | saqadri wrote:
         | Absolutely! We are working on that right now. Currently you can
         | copy the output of one cell and manually use it as input for
         | another cell, but we will be making that flow much simpler
         | soon.
        
       | chaxor wrote:
       | I thought this was going to be from lastmiles (a good low level
       | dev on twitch with excellent content on C dev.)
       | 
       | The I realized they would likely hate the idea of working with
       | python, and do everything in C first. So likely not lastmiles,
       | unfortunately.
        
       | lachlan_gray wrote:
       | I'm amazed that this idea never crossed by mind or my twitter
       | feed. I am usually a dissenter of notebooks, but I could see this
       | being a great use case.
       | 
       | Especially for debugging LM programs. Usually I make logs and
       | have to manually set breakpoints in a program to see where the
       | language algorithm or agent is going wrong, but it would be much
       | simpler to break the algorithm down into cells where I can see
       | where a tangent is arising, and iterate over some different
       | prompts or control flow to get a feel for what can happen at a
       | specific juncture.
        
         | saqadri wrote:
         | While building this we were pleasantly surprised how intuitive
         | the interface feels for prototyping. For example, you can
         | insert chat cells in-between other chat cells, which affects
         | the overall messages (and response from the model). You can
         | tweak the model parameters at every cell. And once you're happy
         | with it you've got a workbook saved that you can revisit in the
         | future (including text annotations).
         | 
         | I'd love to see any workbooks you create for your debugging
         | scenario. Please share them to see if we can improve that
         | scenario further.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-21 23:02 UTC)