• The State of AI report is pretty interesting to read (even if long!). Among the major sections: research, industry, but also politics, safety, and some predictions. You’ll find an executive summary in one slide, on slide #8.
  
  On #22, emergent capabilities of LLMs is covered and mentions Stanford’s research that talks about the importance of more linear and continuous measures as otherwise capabilities sound like they emerge out of the blue.
  
  On #23, they talk about the context length of LLMs being the new parameter count, as models try to have bigger context windows.
  
  However, on slide #24, they also talk about researchers who showed that in long context windows the content provided in the middle is more ignored by LLMs compared to content at the beginning or end of the window.
  So be sure to put the important bits first or last, but not lost in the middle.
  
  Slide #26 speaks about smaller models trained with smaller curated datasets and can rival 50x bigger models.
  
  Slide #28 wonders if we’re running out of human-generated data, and thus, if we’re going to have our LLMs trained on… LLM generated data!

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• Generative AI exists because of the transformer
  I confess I rarely read the Financial Times, but they have a really neat articles with animations on how large language models work, thanks to the transformer neural network architecture, an architecture invented by Google in 2017. They talk about text vector embeddings, how the self-attention makes LLM understand the relationship between words and the surrounding context, and also doesn’t forget to mention hallucinations, how “grounding” and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) can help mitigate them to some extent.

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Inspired my by super boss Richard Seroter with his regular daily reading list, I decided to record and share my tech watch, every week (or so). I always take notes of interesting articles I read for my own curiosity and to remember them when I need those references later on. But also to share them with Les Cast Codeurs podcast! So I hope it’ll be interesting to my readers too!

• LLMs Demand Observability-Driven Development
  A great tribune from Charity Majors on the importance of observability-driven development, in the wake of large language models. Developing LLM based solutions is typically not something you can do with a classical test-driven approach, as you only really get proper test data when you have it coming from production usage. Furthermore, LLMs are pretty much unpredictable and underterministic. But with observability in place, you can better understand why there’s latency in some scenarios, why the LLM came to certain solutions, and this will help you improve as your learn along the way.

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