[HN Gopher] XAI PromptIDE
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       XAI PromptIDE
        
       Author : meetpateltech
       Score  : 129 points
       Date   : 2023-11-06 16:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (x.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (x.ai)
        
       | qwertox wrote:
       | Here are a couple of screen recordings
       | https://twitter.com/TobyPhln/status/1721568711168192540
        
       | orliesaurus wrote:
       | Postman for prompts?
        
         | turnsout wrote:
         | Yeah... how much of an advantage is this over putting your
         | prompts under source control?
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Stil no idea what it is
        
         | jejeyyy77 wrote:
         | do some research about how these models work and what prompts
         | are.
        
           | m3kw9 wrote:
           | That won't help
        
         | seanhunter wrote:
         | It's the sort of thing an engineering team builds when they
         | have way too much time and no idea what to build. There is zero
         | reason to use something like this over, say Jupyter notebooks
         | and the advantages of notebook are obvious: actual researchers
         | are already familiar with it, you can integrate everything into
         | your data science workflow, visualise results etc
        
           | BryanBeshore wrote:
           | So, you're telling me Twitter engineering was over staffed...
        
             | seanhunter wrote:
             | So you're telling me you think x.ai people and twitter
             | engineering people are the same...
        
             | machdiamonds wrote:
             | It's obvious Twitter was overstaffed but xAI has less than
             | 20 employees so definitely not the case there.
        
       | vinni2 wrote:
       | Early access is not available in Europe it seems.
        
         | croes wrote:
         | >Participation in the early access program is currently limited
         | to verified users.
         | 
         | Only paying users.
        
           | waihtis wrote:
           | yes, but also geographically restricted
        
       | beepbooptheory wrote:
       | If this stuff is so powerful, or going to be so powerful, is
       | positioning like this wise? It kinda feels like it is aiming
       | squarely at its own obsolescence. That is, if LLMs turn out to
       | indeed be "the way forward," than surely the esoteric/specialized
       | science of prompt engineering will fall away precisely in step
       | with how much better next-gen LLMs are, right?
       | 
       | Or to put another way, what is the ultimate value of LLMs in
       | general if they are _not_ aiming to make the very idea of
       | "prompt engineering" obsolete?
        
         | jasongill wrote:
         | I understand what you are saying. When OpenAI's API was still
         | new, there was a LOT of "prompt engineering" required - a lot
         | of proper formatting and tricks to get it to produce the
         | required output, proper ways of formatting prompts with "few-
         | shot" examples, etc. Packages like LangChain sprang up because
         | trying to chain together multiple prompts with different inputs
         | and outputs was becoming a bear.
         | 
         | But then, within a few months, the LLM's got better and better
         | to the point where the average ChatGPT user doesn't need to be
         | a "prompt engineer" to get what they want. Sure, there are
         | tricks with adding specific phrases to a prompt to get it to do
         | a better job, but what we now consider "prompt engineering" and
         | what was "prompt engineering" pre-ChatGPT are very different.
         | 
         | LangChain, for example, has reacted by pivoting away from just
         | prompt chaining and templating and into an ecosystem for agents
         | and automated AI "bots". I think that may be overkill for many
         | use cases, and there are good alternatives (Rivet is now my go-
         | to) if you still want to build an LLM-powered app that just
         | requires a specific logical path and specific inputs and
         | outputs, but honestly if I was working at an "AI startup" I
         | would probably be trying to focus my time on getting away from
         | "prompts" and more just to "doing a good job of what you are
         | told".
         | 
         | I do think that "prompts" (especially chat-style conversations)
         | lack a lot of the nuance that you need for a production-grade
         | app especially when it comes to specific input and output
         | formats, etc. Function calling helps a lot but I don't see why
         | xAI is focusing on an IDE for writing a great prompt instead of
         | building an LLM that can make good, structured output with just
         | an "ok" prompt.
         | 
         | The next year will be interesting - it hasn't even been a full
         | year since ChatGPT was released, and look how far the industry
         | has come since the closed-beta release of GPT-3.
        
           | heisgone wrote:
           | For me, I would just like a simple way (no technical
           | knowledge) to invoke LLM sub-steps. Exemple "Find the 4
           | articles of laws most relevant to this case, then anaylse
           | each of those articles separatly". So, a simple non-technical
           | way of doing auto-gpt style substeps. This would greatly
           | increate ChatGPT precision.
        
         | jejeyyy77 wrote:
         | what?
        
           | beepbooptheory wrote:
           | Others have commented to maybe help with my bad writing, but:
           | I am basically trying to say that the promise of LLM models
           | are in the long term at odds with the idea of "prompt
           | engineering" even being a thing in, like, two years. Every
           | improvement to existing models can only really make such a
           | thing more and more obsolete.
           | 
           | Otherwise, what are we even doing here? Expensive regex?
        
         | ianbicking wrote:
         | If you want standard responses then presumably LLMs will start
         | to converge on those responses. But if you want a non-standard
         | response then you have to ask for it, and I think that will
         | continue to be a kind of "prompt engineering".
         | 
         | For instance I'm working in math problem generation right now
         | and you could imagine saying "make the problem harder" and
         | you'll get back... something. But what does "harder" really
         | mean? It's very underspecified. If you work in making
         | educational material you probably have some much clearer
         | criteria, and if you are building a product you may have a
         | clear point of view about what you want in the next problem in
         | a sequence... and "harder" is just punting on all these
         | details.
         | 
         | The tricks may stop being as necessary, but the deciding what
         | you want and how to explain what you want seems essential no
         | matter how smart the LLM is.
        
           | darkwater wrote:
           | If you were to talk to a human that has enough context in the
           | problem space, telling them "make it harder" should achieve
           | something that makes sense... easily, no? I think that at
           | some point a generically trained LLM will be able to do just
           | the same. Prompt engineering will probably be a niche for
           | security (both blue and red teams).
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | I suppose it's always a correct decision to vertically
         | integrate and invest heavily in tooling, from a pure monopolist
         | standpoint. Doing so reduces stakeholders and improve control,
         | which should grant more power to management than constantly
         | having to succumb to engineering, market or baseline reality.
         | 
         | But e.g. very few laptop manufacturers are even capable of
         | designing and fabricating own display panels(not sure Apple
         | does?), let alone ones that provide any advantages, so there's
         | that.
        
       | nothrowaways wrote:
       | Llama 2 is still the most transparent and open source model.
        
         | waynenilsen wrote:
         | is there any evidence of this?
        
         | stainablesteel wrote:
         | even if this is true, to be fair to elon he donated to openai
         | when it was a nonprofit and through some sketchy moves it was
         | turned into a for-profit company where his donation should now
         | be seen as an investment
        
           | danso wrote:
           | To be fair to OpenAI, Musk determined that OpenAI had
           | irreparably lost the race to Google and proposed that he be
           | made CEO [0]. Musk's public complaints about OpenAI being
           | profitable were years[1] after he had decided to abandon
           | OpenAI.
           | 
           | > _But in early 2018, Musk told Sam Altman, another OpenAI
           | founder, that he believed the venture had fallen fatally
           | behind Google, people familiar with the matter said._
           | 
           | > _And Musk proposed a possible solution: He would take
           | control of OpenAI and run it himself._
           | 
           | > _Altman and OpenAI's other founders rejected Musk's
           | proposal. Musk, in turn, walked away from the company -- and
           | reneged on a massive planned donation. The fallout from that
           | conflict, culminating in the announcement of Musk's departure
           | on Feb 20, 2018, would shape the industry that's changing the
           | world, and the company at the heart of it._
           | 
           | [0] https://www.semafor.com/article/03/24/2023/the-secret-
           | histor...
           | 
           | [1]
           | https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034?s=20
        
             | sundarurfriend wrote:
             | > Musk determined
             | 
             | That's a pretty strong way of stating what's basically
             | hearsay from a pretty low effort article.
        
           | jampekka wrote:
           | Not a fan of elon, but it was the bad old Micro$oft that
           | turned OpenAI for-profit.
        
         | redox99 wrote:
         | That's absolutely false. It's trivial to prove that OpenLlama
         | is both more transparent (details on how it's trained), and
         | more open (better license, and public training code).
         | 
         | Llama 2 doesn't even mention the dataset used, so it's not very
         | transparent.
        
       | kkielhofner wrote:
       | I have serious concerns about anything from X at this point.
       | 
       | At the risk of going into some amateur psychological analysis of
       | Elon Musk I think he's pretty well past the point of what happens
       | to so many people insulated by wealth, power, influence, their
       | carefully crafted bubbles/echo chambers, etc.
       | 
       | For example, for all of his talk of bias I am completely unable
       | to get positive and glowing reviews of Tesla stuff out of my X
       | feed. Every single day I label the non-stop Tesla, Cybertruck,
       | posts from Elon himself, etc as "Not interesting to me". I've
       | never given the algorithm any reason to think I want this stuff
       | repeatedly shoved in my face and actually quite the contrary as
       | I've said.
       | 
       | I've been doing this for at least a month and yet they persist.
       | It's pretty clear he has his "thumb on the scale" (to put it
       | mildly) for his own ample self-interests, ego, politics, etc.
       | 
       | Plenty of people and platforms are of course prone to the same
       | issues but from what I've seen this is so gallingly obvious with
       | him and X it's borderline insulting to those of us that have a
       | modicum of understanding of what's going on here.
       | 
       | I think it's very highly likely this will be reflected in
       | anything he or X produces.
        
         | WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
         | Would you mind posting a screenshot of your phone screentime?
         | Just curious
        
           | kkielhofner wrote:
           | I overwhelmingly use X on desktop (browser) so I'm not sure
           | how this would be helpful.
        
         | starik36 wrote:
         | Unfollow people that follow him and you won't get this content.
         | My content used to be all over the place as well. After I've
         | done the pruning, now it's various people talking about topics
         | that I care about. Obviously it's not perfect - things leak
         | through, but far better.
         | 
         | Same with Facebook, my feed is now pretty much photos and news
         | from friends and family.
        
         | extr wrote:
         | It's your algorithm. I mostly see content where he's being
         | dunked on or Tesla is the butt of a joke.
        
         | agloe_dreams wrote:
         | This is easily explained but not in a positive way. X
         | Subscribers get up-ranked in replies and For You. 99% of anyone
         | who would subscribe to X are Elon Fans. As a result, you get
         | the fanboys.
        
         | phh wrote:
         | I was going to say that I never saw anything like that, but I
         | remembered I followed Musk's advice the day he recommended it:
         | I disabled recommendations and only use the "follows" view.
        
           | araes wrote:
           | What? If that's Musk's own advice ... then how is that not
           | the default? O_o
           | 
           | "Our default sucks, use this workaround" "Except you bought
           | the place"
        
         | misiti3780 wrote:
         | I dont have that experience at all, and im a tesla owner. I see
         | more negative tesla stuff than positive, especially about stock
         | value and cybertruck quality problems.
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | I think clicking "Not interested" button is optional. You can
         | just straight up block the content, and adblock any "You might
         | also like".
         | 
         | This is my bigoted view, but my interpretation of "you are the
         | product" principle in freemium model is that they pay you in
         | perceived value. Not the other way around, nor in cash. So,
         | onus is on them to bring you values you recognize.
        
         | Vicinity9635 wrote:
         | This is just an ad hominem pretending to be civil discourse.
         | The topic is XAI, and you're talking about Musk instead.
        
       | bilsbie wrote:
       | Could someone explain this like I'm a time traveler from 2010?
        
         | jareklupinski wrote:
         | Eclipse, but for Python instead of Java, and a textbox instead
         | of Bonzi Buddy
        
       | paxys wrote:
       | Seems pretty...underwhelming as the first product of x.ai
       | considering the initial announcement of its founding came with
       | such a splash. This is more like someone trying to piggy-back off
       | the popularity of LLMs with a trivial tool than driving the space
       | forward in any way.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | Isn't Grok their first product? This seems to be tooling for
         | their main product.
        
       | markush_ wrote:
       | The docs on https://x.ai/ide/docs gives away some of the source
       | code. It's interesting that they are running Python in the
       | browser.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-06 21:01 UTC)