[HN Gopher] MetaGPT: Meta Programming for Multi-Agent Collaborat...
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       MetaGPT: Meta Programming for Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework
        
       Author : Anon84
       Score  : 124 points
       Date   : 2023-08-10 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | sgslo wrote:
       | I ran the 'create a snake' game example using the paper's source
       | at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT
       | 
       | The creation process used 11,940 tokens on input and 2,993 tokens
       | on output, which cost $0.35 and $0.18, respectively.
       | 
       | The game it generated consisted of four python classes in four
       | separate files: Main, Game, Snake, and Food.
       | 
       | The game executed without error on the first try, but the snake
       | wasn't able to 'eat' the food. Here's the relevant code for
       | 'eating' food:                   # Check if the snake ate the
       | food         if self.snake.body[0] == self.food.position:
       | self.score += 1             self.snake.grow()
       | self.food.generate()
       | 
       | The issue was that the snake's body was represented as a list of
       | lists, whereas the food position was stored in a tuple. After
       | changing the food position to a list, the game worked correctly.
        
         | 33a wrote:
         | For comparison, I asked ChatGPT to build one and here's what I
         | got in one shot:
         | 
         | https://chat.openai.com/share/b4b399ef-1def-4f68-b2f1-8c56ca...
         | 
         | Seems to work correctly, didn't have to change anything in the
         | code.
         | 
         | Like all the other agenty stuff I've seen it's not clear what
         | the fluff adds over just prompting the base model.
        
         | reedf1 wrote:
         | Which positions did you "hire"? Would be interested to see if
         | that changes the robustness of the output. Same goes for
         | "investment".
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | joenot443 wrote:
       | I'm gonna take some time this afternoon to give this a spin. The
       | challenge is a multiplayer Snake game set on an expanding canvas
       | which can support an arbitrary amount of players and communicates
       | over websocket. Players join through the browser and control
       | their snake with the keyboard.
       | 
       | This was a take-home challenge I got back in 2015 for an
       | internship. I spent all day on it and had a blast. Curious to
       | compare my nooby college code to state of the art LLM code!
        
       | phillipcarter wrote:
       | Meta-commentary: these different AI agent systems (frameworks?)
       | sure are good at racking up GitHub stars but don't appear to have
       | any use beyond a fun demo. My impression is that, like AutoGPT,
       | this will simply fall over with anything even mildly complicated.
       | Maybe it's the direction we're ultimately headed, but I'm just
       | far too skeptical given what I've seen so far, and I don't
       | believe we just need the right orchestration of models to pull
       | off useful general purpose AI agents.
        
         | cyanydeez wrote:
         | I'm sensing it's gonna draw the same low code/no code crowd
         | with maybe 5-10% improvement but the same or worse technical
         | debt
        
         | penjelly wrote:
         | agreed. those initial projects didnt go far and they werent
         | particularly innovative imo. Doubt this is any different
        
         | 33a wrote:
         | I think at least some of it is outright fraud. A lot of these
         | are being pushed by shameless spammers and former crypto
         | hucksters. Some of the vanity metrics like followers and stars
         | can just be bought if you have a few bucks, and boosting those
         | numbers makes it easier to cheat and convince others to give
         | you more money. This cycle effectively pays for itself assuming
         | you don't care about the reputational risks.
        
           | jondwillis wrote:
           | +1, SuperAGI's discord feels very crypto.
        
         | og_kalu wrote:
         | It's more than just a react loop but i think there's promising
         | research in multi gent cooperation. Notice the first doesn't
         | even use GPT-4.
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924
         | 
         | https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485
        
       | og_kalu wrote:
       | Papers that try to implement a multi agent system
       | 
       | https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07924
       | 
       | https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02485
        
       | WanderPanda wrote:
       | Is it just me or should it be "Meta Programming for a
       | Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework". I'm not a native speaker
       | but I encounter this kind of weird word order a lot in papers
       | recently and it came to no surprise to me that the author list
       | contains a lot of chinese sounding names. I would be curious if
       | this word order sounds better when translated into Mandarin word
       | by word.
        
       | primitivesuave wrote:
       | This is just a collection of static ChatGPT prompts and an output
       | aggregator - I really don't see any novel research or real-world
       | applicability of this aside from potentially scaffolding a
       | project. One of the assumptions baked into the coding prompt is
       | that you will never need to use an external library or API [1]
       | which is an inherent requirement in most practical use cases.
       | 
       | > ## Code: {filename} Write code with triple quoto, based on the
       | following list and context.
       | 
       | > 1. Do your best to implement THIS ONLY ONE FILE. ONLY USE
       | EXISTING API. IF NO API, IMPLEMENT IT.
       | 
       | 1.
       | https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT/blob/main/metagpt/actions/...
        
         | sprobertson wrote:
         | That prompt has a lot of shouting, I kind of feel bad for the
         | prompted.
        
       | makk wrote:
       | Just starting to read this. Their Fig. 1 is basically the README
       | of a project we've been quietly working on.
       | 
       | It's easy to imagine how systems like these might succeed by
       | following workflows analogous to those humans use, on greenfield
       | toy problems.
       | 
       | The trouble is, if you paratrooper something like this into an
       | exiting repository, or you want to build something of real
       | significance, then you've got more context than can fit into an
       | LLMs window. You don't just have the hallucination / stay-on-task
       | problems, you have the problem of the LLM not having everything
       | it needs to know to complete its task.
       | 
       | In my experience, the latter problem of ensuring the LLM knows
       | everything it needs to know is the bigger problem. The other
       | stuff (using standard operating procedures and workflows, as in
       | this paper) is actually the relatively easy stuff. I'm not saying
       | it's easy-easy or that it's obvious from the outside if you
       | haven't played around with it; I'm not disparaging the paper.
       | 
       | So, what I'm most curious about, and I wonder if anyone here has
       | seen good solutions, is this:
       | 
       | How do these multi-agent systems maintain/retrieve the
       | appropriate domain context required to make good design
       | decisions, good coding decisions, and so on? "Use embedding and
       | shove stuff into a vector database" is hand-wavy and doesn't get
       | you all the way there. I'm looking for concrete solutions;
       | academic papers that show a lot of promise; and the like.
       | 
       | (Maybe they lay it out in this paper and I just haven't gotten to
       | it yet. But if they've cracked that nut I suspect they would lead
       | with it.)
        
       | penjelly wrote:
       | strange to me it was linked here via arxiv instead of github
        
         | jpdus wrote:
         | I submitted via Github 2 days ago [1] but didn't get any
         | traction. But probably couldn't be submitted again with the
         | Github link...
         | 
         | Anyways nice to see some discussion here, didn't read a lot
         | elsewhere about the project.
         | 
         | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37053201
        
       | thatcherthorn wrote:
       | To me, the recent breakthroughs in generative AI seem as big as
       | when the Internet or the smartphone became generally available.
        
         | jsemrau wrote:
         | Expand please. I think the initial hype is gone and we see that
         | most implementations are not that much of a game changer just
         | yet. Stable Diffusion can create images but its still
         | incredibly cumbersome to find the right seed and prompt to get
         | the image one desires. ControlNet, Inpainting, and Loras are
         | helpful but have to be implemented in a useful workflow.
        
           | sdenton4 wrote:
           | Well, the internet had a hype-cycle as well... It went from
           | very exciting to a niche for weirdoes to completely
           | ubiquitous.
        
           | thatcherthorn wrote:
           | I agree that the hype has dissipated. I'd probably contribute
           | a large part of that to media cycles though.
           | 
           | Personally, I think the use cases that go beyond chat are
           | going to be the most valuable. Specifically, the ability to
           | produce structured information.
        
       | 33a wrote:
       | I strongly believe this to be total bullshit. Here's how I
       | managed to recreate their example of a BlackJack game using a
       | single simple prompt in ChatGPT:
       | 
       | https://chat.openai.com/share/561419c8-4143-4172-b5e2-a411ee...
       | 
       | I'm not convinced the meta/agenty/company stuff is doing anything
       | to help the LLM generate working code and it looks like they
       | never bothered to check the null hypohesis before hitting
       | publish.
        
         | saliagato wrote:
         | I ageee. Other examples can be reproduced with a straight input
         | output prompt
        
       | tsunamifury wrote:
       | We're doing this with allofus.ai
       | 
       | It's pretty interesting how well it works, but there is a lot
       | more to improve as you can refine the agents for more than their
       | generalized domain, into their perspective and real publish
       | knowledge for increased improvement.
        
       | Imnimo wrote:
       | I am very skeptical that doing things like producing "Competitive
       | Quadrant Charts" (see Figure 3) is a helpful form of prompt
       | engineering. The extremely weak ablation (Section 4.4) rings a
       | lot of alarm bells for me also.
        
       | monkeydust wrote:
       | I'm curious, is anyone using any kind of LLM agent workflow in a
       | client facing production environment?
        
         | jxf wrote:
         | Yes. We've launched multiple production instances of this
         | across a handful of clients. In general humans using the new
         | workflows show very significant performance and quality
         | improvements over unassisted humans so far for the well-defined
         | tasks the workflows are tailored to perform.
        
           | TheObviousOne wrote:
           | can you elaborate?
        
             | jxf wrote:
             | Probably not without violating an NDA. What would you like
             | to know?
        
         | marviel wrote:
         | Yes, the key is to implement clear roles, responsibilities,
         | relationships, and communication channels, as the OP article
         | explains.
        
         | drunkencoder wrote:
         | Yes, recently upscaled research for my iOS app. Have made a
         | pipeline for fact extracts from various sources, including some
         | sentiment analysis. Would have taken me years to do it
         | manually. Will mainly be value adding for end user . Not
         | directly client facing since this is done offline and shipped
         | as data into the final product.
        
         | TuringNYC wrote:
         | >> I'm curious, is anyone using any kind of LLM agent workflow
         | in a client facing production environment?
         | 
         | Yes. Not everyone will admit as most big companies have
         | policies against it. Small companies are, because the cost
         | saving is so high.
        
         | tsunamifury wrote:
         | allofus.ai
         | 
         | our entire focus is on multi-agent workflows based and trained
         | on real peoples published work. I think the output is amazing,
         | but I'm biased of course. Its ability to accomplish soft tasks
         | like advice, help etc is far superior to vanilla GPT4
        
         | Lambdanaut wrote:
         | Yes, in public safety to make response suggestions to emergency
         | operators in time critical situations when texting is the mode
         | of communication.
        
           | ativzzz wrote:
           | This seems... like a terrible idea on the surface. The cost
           | of LLM hallucination in a time critical crisis situation
           | seems immense
        
         | TrickardRixx wrote:
         | My employer is. The LLM agent did not replace any humans,
         | though. It was created as a new value-add service for clients.
        
       | zoogeny wrote:
       | Once we start talking about multi-agent AI systems I think my
       | intuitions go out the window. If we consider that GPT-4 is about
       | as capable as a reasonably intelligent high school graduate or
       | college freshmen, I wonder how much actual benefit we get from
       | multi-agent setups.
       | 
       | I mean that intuitively I couldn't imagine replacing 1
       | experienced professional with 1, 2, 10, 100 or even 1000
       | intelligent high school graduates. Intelligence doesn't seem
       | strictly additive across multiple individuals for all cases. But
       | then I consider that one of the most powerful life-lines in the
       | TV game show "Who wants to be a millionaire" was the "Ask the
       | audience". I am reminded of the cliche of the wisdom of crowds,
       | even when the crowd is made up of non-experts.
       | 
       | This suggests to me that there is a kind of problem where
       | multiple lower power agents can solve the issue to a higher
       | quality. But there are also kinds of problem where a single
       | higher-power intelligence will be necessary. I haven't developed
       | an intuition when each approach is valid.
        
         | jhaenchen wrote:
         | Different components of thought should be specialized. Choosing
         | the meta structure will likely have an impact on what the
         | system can achieve simply by the benefit of
         | compartmentalization.
        
         | danielvaughn wrote:
         | Interesting, multi-agent was almost my first thought when I
         | began using ChatGPT. For complex tasks I figured you would want
         | to chain together several LLMs, each for a dedicated domain. It
         | would actually be really neat to be able to use a Zapier-like
         | interface to build your own AI workflow.
        
         | dmarchand90 wrote:
         | I suspect the real value is more from an architecture and
         | caching perspective.
         | 
         | Architecture as in you may have multiple GPT instances being
         | prompted to look at a problem from different angles: "Analyse
         | the problem as a pessimist", "As an optimist", "as a
         | mathematician", "an engineer", "a philosopher", etc.
         | 
         | Caching, as in determining what you can store from these
         | outputs, e.g. "give a numeric 1-10 score of what you think of
         | this product as a LGBT-friendly conservative from the Midwest",
         | etc.
        
           | zoogeny wrote:
           | > look at a problem from different angles
           | 
           | Sure, but just as a thought experiment imagine you have a
           | really bad disease. I give you two options: 100 high-school
           | students can diagnose and prescribe a treatment or you can
           | choose 1 professional with 10 years of experience in related
           | diseases.
           | 
           | You might initially prefer the professional with 10 years of
           | experience. Would your opinion change if I told you that I
           | selected the high-schoolers to be diverse so that one is
           | pessimist, one is an optimist, one got good grades in
           | engineering, one loves philosophy?
           | 
           | Of course, my intuition might be wrong. For example, perhaps
           | it legitimately would be better to have 100 high-school
           | students where one is a high-school level ability with ear-
           | nose-throat, one is a high-school level ability in oncology,
           | one is a high-school level ability in cardiology, etc. Except
           | some control AI would have to synthesize their answers into a
           | coherent response ... and that controller would be high
           | school level.
           | 
           | I'm not really sold either way if I am honest. I don't think
           | we have the answers to these questions. It just shows that my
           | intuition about intelligence is open to challenges.
        
             | JieJie wrote:
             | In real life, though, that specialist with 10 years
             | experience has a 2 year waiting list for new patients, and
             | you wouldn't even get in to see them anyway, because they
             | don't take your health insurance.
             | 
             | Meanwhile, the "100 high school students" on a mobile phone
             | are the only medical consultation someone in Sub-Saharan
             | Africa or Southern Asia is going to have access to at all.
             | 
             | "Why Not Both" would surely apply here. Maybe we can't give
             | everyone access to a kind, caring, patient human doctor;
             | but we sure can make coming in second place a lot less
             | painful.
             | 
             | [0]https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2017-world-bank-and-
             | who-...
        
             | dmarchand90 wrote:
             | I suspect the divide may end up similar to that between a
             | start up and a large company. Yes, some problems are better
             | solved by a single person. But others benefit from a
             | division of thought even if there is some bureaucratic
             | overhead.
        
               | zoogeny wrote:
               | That is my speculation. But the question is one of
               | intuition. If the speculation is correct, that some
               | problems are better solved by a single more intelligent
               | agent, then how can I determine the appropriate approach?
               | 
               | What I mean to say is, if I am considering building a
               | product based on LLMs then I may have to make a basic
               | decision: can I use multiple cheap LLMs in a multi-agent
               | setup or must I use a single expensive powerful LLM.
               | Right now I don't have any intuition on what kinds of
               | problems are solved most efficiently by either approach.
               | Just looking at a problem description I can't intuit
               | which approach is appropriate.
        
             | bagels wrote:
             | Do they have access to all of the information on the
             | internet? Might give them a lot better chance.
        
             | jxf wrote:
             | It's not quite the same thing, but the "mixture of experts"
             | model is a popular deep learning approach that displays
             | very good performance: see e.g.,
             | https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.02813
        
         | _pdp_ wrote:
         | Understanding a single node of the system is not the same as
         | understanding the sum of all parts. In other words, a system of
         | 2 high school graduates may appear at first as the sum of the
         | output of just 2 high school graduates but the sum of 1000 high
         | school graduates may appear as super intelligence.
         | 
         | The phenomenon I am describing is known as "Emergence."
        
         | djangelic wrote:
         | Forgive my conjecture, as I'm no expert in this field, but have
         | enjoyed playing with the different models.
         | 
         | I see it as a matter of attention. GPT-4 is limited in the
         | number of tokens you can feed it and receive back from it. I
         | see this as how much attention the LLM can give you. I see
         | meta-gpt and other models like this as increasing the attention
         | of the LLM by allowing it combine it's short attention span
         | with multiple assessments of the request, and give you a more
         | complete picture of what you want because it can keep giving it
         | consistent attention to the problem at hand, instead of simply
         | trying to solve it on the first try.
         | 
         | Someone please correct me if I'm way off, but this simple
         | mental model helps me abstract this.
        
           | hooande wrote:
           | The problem with this is that it has no memory across the
           | different contexts. An analogy would be giving one page of a
           | five page document to five different people, then taking it
           | away and asking them to collaborate. While they can each give
           | more attention to their individual page, none of them can see
           | the whole picture and a lot of information will be lost when
           | trying to communicate.
           | 
           | You can use multiple agents, or split a lot of information
           | across multiple requests to one agent. The result is the
           | same. Some problems require a full understanding of the whole
           | picture.
        
         | wefarrell wrote:
         | > I mean that intuitively I couldn't imagine replacing 1
         | experienced professional with 1, 2, 10, 100 or even 1000
         | intelligent high school graduates
         | 
         | This analogy doesn't make sense, because the professional is
         | presumably also a high school graduate. This case is more like
         | leveraging a team of specialists with expertise in different
         | domains.
        
         | Closi wrote:
         | > If we consider that GPT-4 is about as capable as a reasonably
         | intelligent high school graduate or college freshmen, I wonder
         | how much actual benefit we get from multi-agent setups.
         | 
         | It's worth noting that GPT-4 internally uses a Mixture of
         | Experts (MoE) model with 8 'experts' internally, so it's more
         | similar to a multi-agent setup than you might think initially.
        
           | lordofgibbons wrote:
           | > It's worth noting that GPT-4 internally uses a Mixture of
           | Experts (MoE) model with 8 'experts' internally, so it's more
           | similar to a multi-agent setup than you might think
           | initially.
           | 
           | That's a very common misunderstanding of what MoEs are. What
           | you're describing is an Ensemble.
           | 
           | A MoE is where a the input is "routed" to one of X "experts"
           | in the higher layers of the network. Something like this:
           | {input} -> [lower layers] -> <decide which upper layers to
           | send input to> -> [expert] -> output
           | 
           | And these experts aren't experts in the space of human
           | defined subjects. Their expertise are in some embedding
           | space, which might or might not line up with our intuition of
           | a subject.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | > It's worth noting that GPT-4 internally uses a Mixture of
           | Experts (MoE) model with 8 'experts' internally
           | 
           | Has this actually been confirmed, either officially by OpenAI
           | or otherwise? As far as I know, George Hotz claimed this
           | once, and since then everyone just assumed it was the truth
           | without actually waiting for any sort of verification.
        
             | sheepscreek wrote:
             | TL;DR This might work - but it will be like watching
             | Groundhog Day. It will require many iterations, make too
             | many mistakes to get there and won't remember a thing.
             | 
             | My naive understanding of layers in a model is that each
             | layer loosely acts as an expert in one step of the entire
             | process.
             | 
             | For example, in an object recognition model, one layer
             | takes on the task of separating objects from the
             | background, another excels at knowing the colour of
             | different things, another might learn the difference
             | between a blue sky vs. the colour sky blue.
             | 
             | So essentially, we're trying to mimic the same working
             | model at a higher level of abstraction. Similar to how our
             | body is made of atoms. Many atoms make a molecule. Many
             | molecules make organic tissue, and amino acids that perform
             | more complex operations. Skip all the way up and you have a
             | human being. Human beings in numbers can put a man on the
             | moon, create anti-matter and nuclear explosions.
             | 
             | In theory - this can work just as well. One agent to
             | provide a solution, another to critique it, another to
             | verify it, another to mimic the end-user. The big obvious
             | missing piece is memory and the ability to learn while
             | doing (at least in existing LLMs).
             | 
             | It's like having a software development team that's frozen
             | in time and knowledge. These LLM agents will always require
             | some micromanagement and hand holding, and will waste a lot
             | of resources with failed attempts - that they are going to
             | repeat every time you ask them to perform this task.
        
           | zoogeny wrote:
           | Right, but the intuition I am going for isn't "Are 10 high-
           | school students who collaborate together smarter than 1 high-
           | school student working on their own".
           | 
           | The intuition I am asking for is more like: "Are 10, 100, or
           | 1000 GPT-3s capable of producing the equivalent intelligence
           | of 1 GPT-4". That kind of reasoning expanded to GPT-N.
           | 
           | And further, if no number of GPT-3s can reach the level of
           | intelligence of a GPT-4, then what set of problems can be
           | solved by 100s of GPT-3s in a mixed model and what problems
           | require the single GPT-4.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | You can generally amplify models by using more tokens, more
             | calls or relying on some oracle of correctness. I see rapid
             | growth of synthetic datasets from now on, we need the
             | diversity of synthetic data to progress further.
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | Cosign, with extreme prejudice. We went through this with
         | AutoGPT.
         | 
         | I see two camps, people quietly working, and people working on
         | grandiose ideas from the initial rush that make good headlines
         | but not good products.
         | 
         | Some informal warning signs I use subconciously:
         | 
         | - "paper" on Arxiv, and its about prompt engineering
         | 
         | - agent_S_
         | 
         | - state machine where the LLM is eating its own output
         | repeatedly
         | 
         | - LLM makes decisions based on its own output.
         | 
         | There's 100x more alpha in the obvious stuff because even
         | that's not well-implemented or shared widely. Ex. people are
         | still stuck on hallucinations 90% of the time: an obvious way
         | to handle that is doc retrieval.
         | 
         | Last n.b.: in 2021 I was frustrated with ~100% of models being
         | behind locked doors. Then, I saw how GPT3.0 was working and
         | evolving. My mantra became "products not papers." Maybe that
         | applies downstream of the LLM now.
        
           | zoogeny wrote:
           | > My mantra became "products not papers." Maybe that applies
           | downstream of the LLM now.
           | 
           | I agree, in the sense that my intuition is fed by having as
           | many available examples as possible. I am not even sure one
           | could quantify the difference between intelligence levels in
           | a way that I would be satisfied with in a paper.
           | 
           | For example, I find it intuitive that a mixture of 10
           | narrowly fine-tuned GPT-3s are better at a task than 1
           | broadly fine-tuned GPT-3. But I don't have a real intuition
           | about how many GPT-3s you would have to mix to match the
           | quality of GPT-4, or if there even is _any_ number of GPT-3s
           | you can mix to achieve the result of GPT-4. I think we just
           | need to start building systems and see what happens.
        
           | tarun_anand wrote:
           | Are you saying AutoGPT has similar problems or has it solved
           | it?
           | 
           | We tried it recently and found it very challenging to get it
           | to accomplish simple tasks.
        
             | refulgentis wrote:
             | TL;DR: AutoGPT has similar if not identical problems
             | 
             | re: AutoGPT
             | 
             | Got really excited at first. Thought maybe I had missed
             | that it was viable in a year of playing with LLMs. Tried a
             | few demos, didn't work. Looked into it more and confirmed a
             | core loop involved LLM eating its own output to make
             | decision.
             | 
             | I still kept investigating it on my todo list, in case my
             | earlier experiments with that approach were wrong.
             | 
             | I took it off the todo list later.
             | 
             | I saw near-universal feedback like yours, that general
             | technique never worked IMHO, and IMHO sycophancy explains
             | why. Paper here[1], TL;DR the model is very likely to
             | agree, so critical feedback loops over multiple steps tend
             | to settle into a loops of steps.
             | 
             | IMHO this doesn't mean sycophancy breaks _all_ workflows,
             | ex. a flow for writing a story involving outlining,
             | writing, criticizing, then rewriting is a genuine real
             | quality boost.
             | 
             | However, if a human does write => criticize 10 times, it
             | keeps getting better each iteration. If you have an LLM do
             | it 10 times, IMHO it's actively harmful after round 3.
             | 
             | "outline" => ["write page 1", "write page 2", "write page
             | 3"] => ["feedback on page 1"..."feedback on page3" => ["use
             | feedback and original draft to rewrite page1"..."page3"] =>
             | "combine pages 1 2 and 3 into cohesive story"
             | 
             | [1] https://www.anthropic.com/index/discovering-language-
             | model-b...
        
               | vidarh wrote:
               | I've tested the writing loop you describe and the biggest
               | problem seems to be that currently GPT4 is good at
               | generalities, but gets into loops of generalities that
               | doesn't drive things forward when you expect too much
               | detail.
               | 
               | It's not that it can't improve the writing further per
               | se, but that it takes very detailed prompting to get it
               | to give a detailed enough critique to do so consistently
               | enough across even a page (e.g. ot might come uo qith a
               | great lone but proceed to edit out the best paragraph
               | elsewhere) to the point that I tend to agree with you in
               | as much as it at least will take a much more convoluted
               | chain of prompts to _maybe_ get there at the moment, and
               | you 'll be fighting GPT4s tendency to actively cheer on
               | really juvenile prose the whole way.
               | 
               | In a way I think the biggest hindrance to get it to write
               | better at the moment is that it has awful "taste", and
               | having to explicitly give it a long list of rules to
               | check against is a poor substitute.
               | 
               | As an _aide_ , though, I think you could get reasonable
               | but not great results at "bridge these two paragraphs and
               | maintain the style" type tasks, or expanding descriptions
               | into a paragraph or two, though more so for non-fiction
               | writing.
               | 
               | For fleshing out the basics of a technical spec and
               | pointing out what I've missed I've had decent luck, on
               | the other hand. It's not come up with any Earth
               | shattering revelations, but for a dry spec that's not the
               | point.
        
         | computerex wrote:
         | I think it has to do with the fact that LLM's are stochastic,
         | autoregressive models. There are "trajectories" that it can
         | take that are wrong (hallucinations) and there are trajectories
         | that lead to the right answer. In essence multi-agent is doing
         | something like self consistency, self-reflection.
        
         | hooande wrote:
         | The difference is that an LLM isn't 1000 different
         | intelligences. It's one intelligence, being asked to pretend to
         | be 1,000 different people. Every instance is the essentially
         | the same weights trained on essentially the same data. The
         | difference in perspective doesn't resemble that of the
         | difference between any two humans.
         | 
         | Humans love to think of multi agent systems as being like a
         | team of people. It's much more like a writer imagining
         | different characters and how they would respond. When George RR
         | Martin imagines all 500 characters in Game of Thrones, there is
         | a lot of diversity of perspective and thought there. But all of
         | that is coming from one intelligence and doesn't represent a
         | collaboration in any traditional sense.
        
           | dragonwriter wrote:
           | > The difference is that an LLM isn't 1000 different
           | intelligences. It's one intelligence, being asked to pretend
           | to be 1,000 different people.
           | 
           | No, its not.
           | 
           | Its more like 1,000 individuals sharing one genetic template.
           | 
           | Its just that the experiential context that along with the
           | template makes an individual is _very small_ with LLM
           | instances.
        
           | og_kalu wrote:
           | >The difference is that an LLM isn't 1000 different
           | intelligences. It's one intelligence, being asked to pretend
           | to be 1,000 different people.
           | 
           | No it's not. It does no good for a Language Model to
           | configure a global persona. It needs to be able to predict
           | text from wildly varying backgrounds and contexts. It's not
           | pretending anymore than anything else it does is pretending.
           | 
           | That's why experiments like the below actually work
           | 
           | Large Language Models as Simulated Economic Agents: What Can
           | We Learn from Homo Silicus?
           | (https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07543)
           | 
           | Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human
           | Samples (https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06899)
           | 
           | A perfect LLM would predict Einstein as well as it would
           | predict the dumbass down the street.
           | 
           | Now RLHF does incentivize a more global persona by default
           | but stepping away from that is trivial
        
           | malaya_zemlya wrote:
           | I imagine you could still build a dream team of GPT3.5, GPT4,
           | LLama2, Vicuna and their friends
        
         | hm-nah wrote:
         | Mmmm... Assuming you're referring to US high school, I'm going
         | to say that GPT-4 is _more useful_ than a high school graduate.
         | 
         | Rationale:
         | 
         | - Speed - Ability to recall - Depth and breadth of "exposure"
         | 
         | I can't speak to others high school experience, but in my
         | experience, high school does not prepare young adults to be
         | useful in the same settings that GPT-4 could be useful.
         | 
         | Example prompt: - Pose this to a high school graduate and
         | GPT-4, somehow benchmark quality.
         | 
         | 1. "You are an experienced business strategist. Your client has
         | the following problem <insert problem synopsis here>. Generate
         | an outline of brainstorming topics your client should consider
         | to accomplish <insert goal here>.
         | 
         | - First, GPT-4 is going to respond in ~30sec or less - Second,
         | a high school grad has 0 context for these types of prompts.
        
           | ke88y wrote:
           | _> Mmmm... Assuming you're referring to US high school, I'm
           | going to say that GPT-4 is more useful than a high school
           | graduate._
           | 
           | Useful for what?
           | 
           | LLMs are largely useless for the vast majority of labor that
           | people with HS degrees tend to do (which mostly involves not
           | being behind a keyboard all day).
        
         | beders wrote:
         | GPT-4 is not comparable to a high school graduate.
         | 
         | It will happily hallucinate facts and claim they are true.
         | Well, ok, maybe it is ;)
         | 
         | The issue they seem to tackle is trying to minimize
         | hallucinations by injecting some human expertise into the
         | pipeline. They do this by more strictly defining the roles and
         | tasks a step in that pipeline needs to accomplish.
        
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