Friday, December 20, 2024

12/20/24: Primo test and discussion

  Machine Learning Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be removed from the invite list as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
 Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu

Agenda & Minutes  (143rd meeting, Dec. 20, 2024

Table of Contents
* Agenda and minutes
* Transcript (when available)

Agenda and minutes
  • Announcements, updates, questions, presentations, etc.
    1. Meet next week, 12/27? No, next meeting will be Jan. 3, 2025.
    2. Recall the masters project that some students are doing and need our suggestions about:
      • Suppose a generative AI like ChatGPT or Claude.ai was used to write a book or content-focused website about a simply stated task, like "how to scramble an egg," "how to plant and care for a persimmon tree," "how to check and change the oil in your car," or any other question like that. Interact with an AI to collaboratively write a book or an informationally near-equivalent website about it!
        • BI: Maybe something like "Public health policy."
        • LG: Change to "How to plan for retirement." 
        • ET: Gardening (veggies, herbs in particular). Specifically, growing vegetables from seeds. 
        • JK is focusing on prompt eng. with agents and may have comments if present.
    3. If anyone else has a project they would like to help supervise, let me know!
    4. JK proposes complex prompts, etc. (https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1uuG4P7puw8w2Cm_S5opis2t0_NF6gBCZ).
    5. NM project.
    6. Here is a tool the library is providing. Some people here thought it would be a good idea to try it live during a meeting, so we did.

      Library trial of AI-driven product Primo Research Assistant

      The library is testing use of Primo Research Assistant, a generative AI-powered feature of Primo, the library's search tool. Primo Research Assistant takes natural-language queries and chooses academic resources from the library search to produce a brief answer summary and list of relevant resources. This video provides further detail about how the Assistant works.
      You can access Primo Research Assistant directly here, or, if you click "Search" below the search box on the library home page, you will see blue buttons for Research Assistant on the top navigation bar and far right of the Primo page that opens. You will be prompted to log in using your UALR credentials in order to use the Research Assistant.

      The meeting ended here.
       
    7. The campus has assigned a group to participate in the AAC&U AI Institute's activity "AI Pedagogy in the Curriculum." IU is on it and may be able to provide updates when available, every now and then but not every week.
    8. Anything else anyone would like to bring up?
  • Here are the latest on readings and viewings
    • Next we will continue to work through chapter 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M. We got up 15:50 awhile ago but it was indeed awhile ago so we started from the beginning and went to 15:50 again. Next time we do this video, we will go on from there. (When sharing the screen, we need to click the option to optimize for sharing a video.)
    • We can work through chapter 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc.
    • We can work through chapter 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jl0dxWQs8
    • Computer scientists win Nobel prize in physics! Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf got a evaluation of 5.0 for a detailed reading.
    • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion.
    • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more.
    • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
    • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
    • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
    • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). 6/7/24: vote was 4 3/7. We read the abstract. We could start it any time. We could even spend some time on this and some time on something else in the same meeting. 

Transcript:

ML discussion group  
Fri, Dec 20, 2024

1:01 - Unidentified Speaker
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon.

1:06 - Multiple Speakers
Good evening.

1:09 - D. B.
How are you?

1:13 - Multiple Speakers
Good.

1:19 - D. B.
We'll give it another minute. And we'll get going.

1:53 - Unidentified Speaker
Hi, D. H. Hello.

1:55 - Y. P.
How are you? Good.

1:57 - D. B.
How's it going with the all those people that you were?

2:03 - Y. P.
So I spoke to V. today. And I'm going to have a follow up call tomorrow. D. was to send me some updates. And the other guy never So I think only three responded. And I'll send you a summary of this weekend. I'll tell you, give you an update of the people who have reached out and I've been talking to. But it seems that V. is the first person who is likely to start. And then D., I think I'm waiting. He said he wants to update his profile and then get back. So I'm waiting for him. And R., right? There's one person, I don't think I got ever a response, but two candidates I'm in touch with. And I think that's what you're aware of, right? There are three people who reached out.

2:59 - D. B.
Oh, well, there were more than I thought there were like five or six or something, but you know, you expect some people to sort of make an initial inquiry and that's it. And the same things happen with the idea of using AIs to write a book. Several people responded, and only two people were here last week. But B. is here this week. Welcome. Thank you.

3:30 - B. I.
Yeah. So anyway. I'm sorry. I did send you an email regarding the other project. I'm not sure if it's But

3:45 - Y. P.
And who is speaking right now? I'm sorry.

3:48 - B. I.
My name is B. I. OK, I did not see your email. Maybe for some of you, I may have to look at the spam. I'm sorry about it. OK, I'll send another mail.

4:02 - Y. P.
What I'm going to do is in the chat, I'm going to share my phone number. If you don't hear back from me today or tomorrow, just text me or whatever.

4:14 - B. I.
accept me and I'll make sure that somebody will reach out to you. Okay. So let me thank you.

4:30 - D. B.
All right.

4:32 - L. G.
All right, so Y., did you did you put it in the chat?

4:49 - D. B.
I'm going to put in two minutes.

4:57 - Unidentified Speaker
Okay.

4:59 - D. B.
All right, so the next thing, I guess, or the first thing, nominally, do you all want to meet next week? Or should we skip that and go on to, skip on to January? Okay, well, why don't we- I'm good either way.

5:20 - Multiple Speakers
Yeah. I'm okay.

5:27 - N. M.
I won't be here next week.

5:30 - A. B.
I won't be here either next week.

5:33 - D. B.
Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and move. We'll skip next week and meet on January 3.

5:54 - Unidentified Speaker
OK, let's see what else.

5:57 - D. B.
OK, so last time we started talking about this project that a number of people, masters students, would like to do, which is using generative AI to write books or websites that are roughly equivalent to a book. And so we had two people give topics for their books. I proposed tentative topics for the books last time, and B. is here today. Did you get that message about suggesting a topic for your book or website?

6:42 - B. I.
So I'm still thinking, but I was thinking of doing something Maybe I was thinking of doing something in policymaking, so something like public health. But I haven't gone too deep. I'm still working. Well, I think a book on public health policy would be pretty interesting.

7:10 - D. B.
And it would be an interesting counterpoint to how to bake a cake. Or how to grow vegetables from the seeds.

7:21 - L. G.
It's just a different experience. It'd be interesting to see what happens.

7:26 - Unidentified Speaker
Dr.

7:27 - L. G.
B., I would like to change mine. I did a lot of preliminary research and kind of took the feedback that Dr. P. gave and someone. I wanted to change it to how to plan for your retirement. It gave a lot more options for this book. It made it a little bit more interesting because I could bring in some secondary, like you said, bring in YouTube videos as sources that the determinative stuff was correct. It just gave a lot more diversity in what the AI could give us. I thought it would be a little more exciting topic and more readable for average people.

8:10 - D. B.
Definitely. I'm moving towards retirement at some point. All right. Yeah, that's interesting that the two topics would give different kind of experiences as you try to use preliminary investigation of them. And I don't know who it was, but two people had ideas.

8:30 - L. G.
Instead of doing the prompt or the chain of thought prompting and so forth, maybe you could use agents. And then one person I think we're saying, hey, you could use a single agent, or maybe you could create multiple agents that work together. And so I'm still kind of sketching that idea out kind of like on the back of a napkin. Like if you, if there was like a comparison you could do between the three methods, like what is the right amount of human interaction in it maybe, if there's like a comparative nature that could happen there, or if there was something I could, how many agents would we use in the morning? To agent, like so forth like that.

9:13 - D. B.
From what I understand, agents are a big kind of focus currently of, or there's a lot of interest currently on agents as prompts or agents for prompts, something like that. And J., who's not here this week, is sort of focusing on agents. And if he shows up maybe next time or whenever he shows up, I'll just ask him to tell us a little bit about his agent-based process that he's been thinking about. So yeah, agents for prompting is something I'd like to hear more about personally. OK. And E., welcome. Anything that you want to say about your project?

10:07 - E. T.
Hello. I'm not sure if I need to change my idea. I mean, if that's necessary, I don't mind changing the idea.

10:17 - D. B.
Oh, no, no. It's totally up to you. I mean, it's just really, it's not something that we're expecting or not expecting.

10:27 - E. T.
No, I mean, I just didn't know those were some of the options over there. Went one of them, went with one of them. If it needs to be something more related to information science, I can go with something like that. But again, I haven't thought of something different yet. I gave it a start, though, with Chachapiti. And so just general prompt, if I wanted to write a book about gardening from seeds, growing from seeds, it gave some general steps. And then I started diving deeper into like, if I wanna choose, because the first step was choosing the right seeds for the environment, for the climate, the place I live in. And I was like, okay, how do I choose the right seeds? What vegetables would grow in better in my area? And it started giving me more details. It went on for a while, but that was all I have done towards. All right.

11:38 - D. B.
Well, as you work on it, probably questions and issues will come up, and we can talk about them in our meetings.

11:49 - E. T.
All right.

11:49 - D. B.
Anybody else has a project they want students for? I can always send out another solicitation for students, especially after the semester there's probably going to be some looking for projects. This is from J., but he's not here today. So we'll put that off till next time. And N., did you have anything you wanted to mention about your project? No, sir.

12:15 - Unidentified Speaker
Not at the current moment. OK.

12:18 - N. M.
All right.

12:19 - D. B.
So this has been on the agenda for a bit. There's a poll that came up.

12:25 - Multiple Speakers
Dr. B.? Yeah. I have a quick question.

12:28 - B. I.
As I continue to flesh out my projects, can I always update and change stuff? Does it really have to be the same thing that I said today, or can I change as I continue to do more research?

12:45 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah, you can change. OK. Yeah, no problem.

12:49 - D. B.
OK, so there's this tool that the library has. It's an AI-driven research assistant to help you the library or help you find sources or something. They call it Primo Research Assistant. And people were interested in, and I thought it'd be interesting to go there and just try it out. So why don't we do that? So you go here.

13:20 - Unidentified Speaker
OK, well, I'm going to the library.

13:38 - Unidentified Speaker
Oh, there it is. Let me raise the phone. Well, any anyone have a question they want to ask?

14:00 - D. D.
Yeah, yeah. Information about AI as agent.

14:12 - Unidentified Speaker
Let's see.

14:22 - D. B.
OK?

14:23 - Unidentified Speaker
So it wrote a lot of stuff here. We'll go through it bit by bit.

14:37 - D. B.
All right, why don't we read this paragraph and then and see if there's anything to talk about.

14:54 - A. B.
And then the one reference, I guess that's pointing to a specific source below. I don't know.

15:11 - D. D.
That's what it looks like, but I don't see two anywhere.

15:16 - Unidentified Speaker
It says stream. Yeah.

15:18 - A. B.
Look at that ebook for right there, agents and multi-agent systems.

15:22 - D. D.
Why is it not referenced? Might be.

15:26 - D. B.
Oh, here it is referenced down here. I don't know why they numbered it up to three. All right, anything else on this paragraph? On the reference, did I read that right? It was a video?

15:46 - A. B.
Let's see. Yep, streaming video. So if you click on that, it actually takes you to the video reference.

16:02 - Unidentified Speaker
That's really neat.

16:04 - D. B.
I don't know. Oh, here's a reference.

16:09 - A. B.
Can you scroll down? I'm curious if it had the direct link to it or something. It has more details.

16:29 - D. B.
OK.

16:30 - A. B.
Well, it is a video, but it doesn't seem to have the video here.

16:36 - D. B.
You can find available services, I guess.

16:40 - A. B.
OK, well, it gets you back to the database, essentially. So got it.

16:46 - Unidentified Speaker
OK. All right.

17:05 - Unidentified Speaker
Let's go for this one. Any thoughts or comments?

17:33 - D. B.
I guess I would comment that unless the AI agent has access to real-time sensory input, like camera inputs or microphone inputs or something like that, it just basically lives in the web, which is a kind of virtual environment. That's my only thought.

17:55 - D. D.
Well, the thing is, even in a prompt environment, if you So if you have that kind of information, then you would need some type of a playground or interface API where you can reach the agent. And then you would have to have some other kind of script or algorithm that's running that's grabbing that real-time information and then using it in prompts to prompt the AI. So then it would have access.

18:29 - D. D.
you know, feasible. I mean, it seems like you could do it. I mean, I was able to prompt, prompt AI to the playground, you know, right from my, and get feedback from the AI, right from my, what, what's that visual studio code that the free Python or, well, I guess it's for more than Python, but the IDE.

19:00 - E. G.
Yeah, I was able to do it all inside.

19:13 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah. All right. All right. Let's do those.

19:26 - Y. P.
Anything?

19:27 - D. B.
Well, to me, an interest in a focus or going in the direction of agents means making AIs more like AGs. Artificial General Intelligence, where they're doing higher level coordinating and managing like you'd currently expect a human to do. You could have a book writing agent and then the master's students would have a very easy time writing a book because all they have to do is call the book writing agent.

20:18 - N. M.
That's true.

20:22 - D. B.
you know, how close we are to having a book writing agent, I don't know, it might be a ways into the future or maybe it's doable now, I don't know.

20:39 - Unidentified Speaker
All right.

20:40 - Y. P.
Yeah, my point of view is, you know, even when you say book writing agent, it could be something that is telling you about how to write a book and flow a book and the language and depending on the type of the book whether it's humor or classic or whatever it would be but then also you could be very focused on the subject matter like a book on somebody was talking about food, cooking, gardening whatever it would be and and there would be agents that you know kind of are cross-functional so an agent that just is focused on writing a book and in a particular manner whether it's a memo or biography autobiography and all that and then there are agents that are very specific to topics so I foresee all the agents multi-agent whatever cross-sectional eventually getting into perfection. And to give example that, you know, the team members that are joining, we'll be focusing on two sets of code, one for user interface, which is CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. And then we will focus on Python. These two, if you remember, Dr. Warren had shared that chart. So we have picked up two and then few dimensions. And a few models. But essentially the goal is, can we get a perfect code without any interference? That will be the end vision or the goal that we have. And there will be agents, autonomous agents. So we are building something. I think somebody spoke about APIs, where it will continuously do reiterate and similar to machine learning and others we'll have feedback and it will improvise and then they'll again have feedback it will improvise to an extent that it becomes perfect so that is where I think all these will go but I think it will also be cross-functional that's what I feel eventually it will go to that there is a technical piece of it and there is like an industry piece of it and and then you are getting these outputs or UI code and rules engine or the backend code or API code coming out. And then this, I wanted to share. Any thoughts on that?

23:22 - D. B.
I think that's sort of J. was also talking about having collections of agents, if I understand where you're going. And I can kind of see that a specific agent is very specialized. So if you're going to have sort of general, generality, you'd need a, like a collection of agents that would have to, then you'd have to have something, an agent that coordinates agents or the human coordinates, the agents or something

23:55 - Unidentified Speaker
like that.

23:56 - Multiple Speakers
Um, uh, M., are you familiar with orchestration engines? Huh?

24:01 - E. G.  
Are you guys familiar with orchestration engines?

24:04 - D. B.  
No. An orchestration engine.

24:06 - E. G.  
Um, Say I've got a series of applications that I'm running. Some have predecessors, some have time constraints, some have validation routines. They have to follow a certain schema. An orchestration engine basically takes all of these little pieces, these little applets, code segments, runs them based on parameters. What orchestrates how the information is going to flow across or what's going to run to do certain things. I use the term information at this point because a lot of time orchestration engines basically pull in data, do stuff with it, and then hand it off at the end. But there's a lot of different things that'll do. Say if you have multiple sources that you're bringing in and you're consolidate it down to one format. A lot of times what you're doing in healthcare with FHIR or HL7 from the EMRs, the orchestration engine basically does that. That's what it sounds like you're doing here, is you're basically having this overarching process that'll go out, run these different things. Say, writing a book, first we're going to start with a topic. So you're going to run against an AI engine that's good at setting up a template for a story. Then you're going to take each section and send it out to another one that can allow it to delve deep. A third one that'll identify references and resources so that way you could apply those links to it. And you have that type of cascading effect, almost like an annealing process with a thought.

26:12 - Multiple Speakers
Well, the word orchestration literally means sort of high level management.

26:18 - E. G.
And isn't this what it's doing?

26:21 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

26:22 - L. G.
I mean, I That's kind of the way I was thinking about how you could use it too. I guess I was looking more kind of like if you had, if you had like a, kind of like a hierarchy and then you have, you know, kind of one checking the other one, checking the other one, and eventually someone kind of doing the sourcing for it, you know, and that you know, kind of one checking the other one, checking the other one, and eventually someone kind of doing the sourcing for it, you know, and that way, instead of like me trying to catch all the hidden stations, you have like one AI that pulls, you know, information to check what the other AI had written to then say, OK, maybe we need to rewrite this paragraph. And with third, AI would check that and go through and input. So it's just kind of like what Mr. I don't know if it's possible, but that's what I was thinking, how you could use a multi-agent environment.

27:09 - D. B.
So like a hallucination checking agent.

27:11 - L. G.
Yeah, yeah, something like that. Or even an editor, like an editor in a way.

27:15 - D. B.
Yeah. Or in real life, they wouldn't call it a hallucination checking agent. They would call it a fact checker.

27:21 - L. G.
OK, a fact checker. Well, I've built validation engines.

27:26 - E. G.
So what I'll do is I'll take the output of one AI, pull it in and run it against another AI to validate whether or not the first is hallucinating.

27:39 - D. B.
What would happen if you took the output of one AI, just plugged it into another, just paste it into the of another AI and said, please fact check the following.

27:55 - N. M.
It's the same thing.

27:58 - E. G.
The only difference at that point is you're automating the process versus manually handing it off.

28:07 - D. B.
Yeah. All right. Any other comments? Not from me at this moment.

28:14 - N. M.
I have a question for A.

28:18 - Y. P.
heard you saying validation engines between the prompts. Is it like a plug and play? Have you used something industry that is available industry wide or did you build it grounds up? I built it ground up.

28:36 - E. G.
I'm building out the prompt and I've got the processes. I'll actually have multiple threads running where I'm taking the output one prompt handing it off to another process would read it as the input into another prompt. This allows for the desegregation. And also, a lot of times, if you keep it in the same process, it has that memory. So it'll hallucinate that, yeah, I'm right. But if you put it into another process, it doesn't have that fresh memory or what's called warmed cash at that point. So it's not going to pull from it. OK.

29:22 - Y. P.
Are you open to having conversation in the next two, three weeks? I don't know how your holiday schedule is about this topic offline. I'm very open to it.

29:34 - E. G.
I love talking about it. OK. I mean, this is, this is my hobby. All right. Let's speak about it.

29:43 - Y. P.
I'll send you a message.

29:45 - E. G.
Got it, sir. Thank you. All right. All right.

29:49 - D. B.
So I'm just kind of scrolling down. And I guess, as I interpret it, so far, this is what you'd expect from any AI. This is Primo Research Assistant, not ChatGPT. But it almost could be ChatGPT, right?

30:04 - N. M.
But now it's giving us this. Since it is a library, it's giving us links to sources.

30:13 - D. B.
What do you all think?

30:16 - E. G.
I'd like to put the same thing into OpenAI or chat GPT. So see what we get for an output. But let's let's manage the prompt a little bit better where we ask for say five references. Yeah.

30:39 - D. B.
I think if you ask chat GPT to give you some references, it probably will. And then see if it gives us the same ones.

30:50 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

30:51 - Multiple Speakers
It's pretty bad at references.

30:53 - L. G.
Chat GPT is pretty bad at giving good references like this. Oh, absolutely.

30:59 - N. M.
It gives some like websites and some like published reports.

31:03 - L. G.
And then and sometimes they're not actually right, the references aren't right.

31:08 - D. B.
It'll just make up the references, yeah.

31:11 - L. G.
Well, it's like, yeah, not completely made up, but it may be the wrong year of the report, or it may be, you know, they got that it's like a secondary report, they reported that someone said it was there, but

31:27 - D. B.
it might not be correct. You know, Gemini, Google Gemini is, you know, it's, I've heard that it doesn't, It's not as good as the other AIs in a lot of ways, but actually it is pretty good at giving search results, because that's what Google does, right? That's their specialty. So it'll give, I mean, it may not give results like this, but it'll give links to websites and web pages, because it's like a certain part of a search engine. Yeah. Well, we can go ahead and try the same query for another, another AI, but let's just scroll down a little bit more and just see what else. So here's an abstract for this.

32:11 - Y. P.
The first link.

32:13 - D. B.
I guess we could, you know, it's linked to that. I don't know.

32:18 - Y. P.
One major difference that I would say between this and the other sources that we're talking about is I'm assuming that when you are doing research, the output that you're receiving is more authenticate. So there will be hopefully close to zero elucidation here. So I mean, that is a major plus point. I believe that a library resource would have versus other resources that we're talking about where, hey, if these are the sources that library is suggesting, I can trust in these sources versus if it comes in chatgpt etc. I mean that is a major difference that what I'm seeing right now versus what I would see otherwise and I think it was L. who mentioned on the referencing so one is chatgpt references sometimes if you ask for a reference that this is your source for this but the bigger problem of these other generative AIs, it does not reference at all what training data was used to create that intelligence to reference that. And that's a bigger thread because you don't know what the presumption, assumptions it has before creating that content. And this library content, I believe, and I don't know the back end of how it is generating all these things. So I would be curious to know what is the intelligence being used to even get this. But I'm assuming that that intelligence training perhaps would be more reliable than the other generative. So two pieces, one is what I'm seeing perhaps is more reliable. And also, I'm assuming before this was or this is off somebody has done that ethical and other checks before even allowing this to be used for library. So two thoughts on that. Is it making sense, D.?

34:36 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

34:37 - E. G.
Y., I think that when you're asking for that type of detail, that's the secret sauce. That's the competitive advantage. Everybody knows how to do it. To train an AI. But the nuances associated to that training is what's going to allow a company to have a competitive advantage. And that's where they start. Right now, we're starting to see things like this, where it's maybe trained more to ensure that we had correct references that truly relate to the topic at hand that's tuned to that particular piece.

35:23 - Unidentified Speaker
Correct.

35:24 - E. G.
But A., there is two things, right?

35:28 - Y. P.
One is what I mentioned was the data. I'm not talking about the precise algorithm, transformers, the code that is being used over the data. And I completely agree with you that that particular intelligence. So there are two pieces. One is the code and the core IP that is being used to train the data. And then you have this data that Google has used for search engine and chat GPT is used for chat GPT or open as used for chat GPT. So the intelligence and the code and transformers and how each company is building those transformers and then agents and everything and the whole ecosystem infrastructure and platform. Yes, very, very, very unique. But perhaps, you know, whether it's Bing or Google for search engine, they are going after the same or similar set of data to make all that core component intelligent. So, and I'm talking about data where the illusion hallucination happens and I'm assuming that the library system has kind of done some background check if I can say that so that we can depend on what we are seeing here more so than other generative AI and we can speak offline I don't want to go into detail but and I might be wrong also by the way but I'm going with assumptions Well, this is showing mostly books and a

37:15 - D. B.
journal article, whereas Gemini would give web pages because that's what Google does.

37:25 - Unidentified Speaker
That gives you some more questions. Click on Additional Questions.

37:32 - D. B.
All right, well, I guess we can go to another AI and ask the same question, see what happens. So you were going to say, give me references, right? All right, so now I'm going to. Figure out how to navigate here.

38:04 - Unidentified Speaker
I'm going to chat GPT. So you're saying, please give references?

38:18 - N. M.
What model are you using? Come with different models?

38:26 - D. B.
Yeah, this is not the good model, you can only use it a couple times in a day, and then it won't let you do it anymore unless you pay. So and I already did it today. So this is not their most advanced model. It's one of the older ones.

38:43 - D. B.
So there's that, but let's see what it does.

38:48 - N. M.
There's also been an issue with it giving references and links to articles where it will give you a link that'll take you to one article, but it'll give you a completely different article once you click on it. All right, well, let's hear the reference.

39:12 - D. B.
All right, this is an old standard AI textbook that's been in print for many years. The older versions probably don't even mention, barely, you know, probably have one chapter on neural networks. Here's another book. I think it's a book. Papers.

39:36 - B. I.
I think with the library AI set, that one kind of points you directly to the specific paragraph or the specific part of the book or article is its reference in which I kind of like more as opposed to Chad

39:59 - D. B.
GBC. Yeah, I mean there's no links here.

40:03 - Unidentified Speaker
It's pointing to chapter two. But yeah, no links. Courses.

40:14 - D. B.
I guess if we went to Gemini, let's just go to Google. Am I right? If I type that query in here, it would access Gemini?

40:40 - B. I.
So you have to go to the nine dots at the corner, close to your name.

40:52 - E. G.
Upright. Upright. Upright corner. Square dots.

40:57 - Multiple Speakers
Here? Yeah. No. D.

40:59 - Y. P.
Next to D. Next to D circle. You see the green circle with D? Yeah.

41:07 - D. B.
Right next to it.

41:10 - Y. P.
Right next to it. Yes.

41:12 - D. B.
That was covered up by my Zoom.

41:16 - B. I.
And then you see Gemini.

41:19 - D. B.
Oh, OK. Gemini right here. OK. All right.

41:23 - B. I.
Alternatively, you can just Google search Gemini too.

41:28 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

41:29 - Y. P.
Is that right? Shall I click it?

41:34 - D. B.
I wonder if you have to specify you need actual references, or will it?

41:43 - A. B.
Well, that gave you a quick answer.

41:47 - E. G.
No references either.

41:49 - D. B.
I thought it was generating something, and then it got away.

41:57 - A. B.
I'll try it.

41:58 - D. B.
So A., you're saying, oh, with academic references or something or references. OK.

42:08 - A. B.
So it started again, it started to do something and then it's like, no, nevermind.

42:17 - D. B.
Hey, I was checking.

42:20 - A. B.
I was, I've been kind of quiet playing with this Primo, it's actually really neat. Because I was curious, I took some of my research question, like the double machine learning and stuff like that, and I was playing around with it. It gives you the first five articles, but it's interesting. If you click on the View More Results, it actually takes whatever question you prompt it with. If you look up in the search header, basically like parses it and all the potential different ways like you see at the top search section there you know the ors and all that so it's it basically like takes whatever question you have and then it converts it into however you know many different combinations that it could potentially show up and puts you know you know spits it out in a bunch of or statements and then that's you know ultimately what pulls back the results and they summarize apparently it looks like they just summarized the five at the top.

43:22 - D. B.
So this is this idea of sort of automatic query augmentation. Exactly. I mean, that's been around for some time.

43:31 - A. B.
I haven't.

43:32 - D. B.
I didn't know it would do it. Yeah.

43:36 - A. B.
So it looks like Primo is just sitting on top, right? So it's basically taking your prompt and whatnot, converting it to a query to this database. Pulling back results, and then it looks like it's summarizing just purely what comes back, at least the top five.

43:56 - D. B.
Someone else asked the same question. I'd be really curious to know whether Primo is based on a back-end engine like the OpenAI, same as one of the major ones that we've heard of, or whether they made their own pre-trained?

44:15 - E. G.
Meta dot AI. Select the 400. And for the record, I think this is really cool.

44:28 - A. B.
I'm definitely gonna use it. Yeah, me too.

44:43 - N. M.
OK.

44:43 - D. B.
So wait, what was meta AI? What was the connection?

44:47 - Multiple Speakers
I used login in the lower left. I logged in with my Facebook account.

44:54 - D. B.
Oh, OK.

44:55 - E. G.
And the reason I did that, because you can select your model type. And at that point, I had selected the Lama 3.14 hundred and 5 billion. And I'm getting some really, really nice Output from that one hmm Answered output for what the same question Well, I haven't plugged in this question, but for other questions I've been And you've got there's another with llama 3.2 Just try the question in there and see what we get out of it.

45:41 - D. B.
Like that?

45:43 - Unidentified Speaker
Yes. Oh. Yeah.

45:46 - Y. P.
D., M. Z. wants to know who you are. So that's when you're born.

45:59 - Unidentified Speaker
OK.

46:00 - Y. P.
I'm 65. You want me to share my screen?

46:06 - E. G.
In a minute. Let's just see if this works.

46:10 - D. B.
Maybe not, but if it doesn't work, then.

46:14 - Unidentified Speaker
Or you want to share your screen? Yeah, we can do that. Here's what it's got.

46:25 - Y. P.
A., did you get better answer just because you're logged in?

46:41 - E. G.
Mine was different. I wouldn't say it's better. But I'm also forcing it to use the $405 billion.

46:56 - D. B.
This is getting the same stuff that that other one gave, right?

47:07 - N. M.
The same references.

47:09 - D. B.
What was the other one that we were using that we tried? ChatGPT. Huh? ChatGPT. ChatGPT. Yeah, OK. So this is giving the same answers as ChatGPT.

47:21 - Y. P.
Yeah, so if you remember, I was telling you the point of uniqueness. This is kind of partially proving what I was trying to say, that whether it's Bing or Google, it's going after the same data. And same thing. Like Meta and Chaijipati is going after the same data and it boils down to how they are going, you know, the process or the methods and infrastructure and other things that they have to get after the same data. It boils down to all that and how they are processing, how they are giving answers and what people in general can do with this on top of this will perhaps set them apart because they are going after the Same

48:07 - E. G.
data well, but let me go ahead and share my screen because I'm getting a different output So here I put in the prompt.

48:36 - D. B.
E., if you can increase the font size a little bit, I think it would help. Yeah, there we go.

48:44 - E. G.
provide sources and reference.

48:52 - Unidentified Speaker
That's pretty good. That's a pretty good list.

49:12 - E. G.
Other than validating all of the references that it has? I'm confident.

49:18 - Multiple Speakers
Now, a lot has to do with prompt engineering, too, by asking the prompt.

49:28 - N. M.
And here it goes through all of the references.

49:57 - D. B.
Makes sense

49:57 - D. B.
Makes sense.

49:58 - A. B.
But then to clarify, though, with this, the Primo application, right? It looks like from what I can see, it's, you know, it's converting your prompt into essentially a query. That hits the the library database. Pulls back, you know, and then parses and all sorts of potential queries and then pulls back the results. And then it looks like it's then summarizing those results and presenting it to you. It's not really trained.

50:29 - D. B.
It's generating, it's taking your question and turning it into a traditional type expanded, automatically expanded query, as opposed to, you know, ChatGPT or these other AIs, which don't do that. They don't convert your question into a query. They use the question as the query and use AI to figure out how to respond.

50:52 - A. B.
Exactly. So I think on the upside of this Primo thing, any new potential research that comes available, you're going to immediately get it as you hit the library database, for example, as opposed to LLM that would maybe need to be refreshed every so often or something like that.

51:13 - D. B.
OK, but Primo is also doing an AI-style summary. So it must have a subroutine call chat GPT or one of the others, I'm thinking.

51:26 - A. B.
Well, that's possible. I was thinking it was probably summarizing the information that's getting back from the queries in the database, but I'm just guessing.

52:34 - Unidentified Speaker
It's still chugging away.

52:39 - E. G.
And I've broken this before a few times. Mark Zuckerberg is going to come after you.

52:49 - Y. P.
Who's using all my processing power?

53:01 - Unidentified Speaker
OK, I'm just logging in.

53:04 - Multiple Speakers
I'm logging in. I used a tar out of it.

All right, well, we're kind of at the end.

53:16 - D. B.
We were successful, though. We broke AI.

53:20 - L. G.
We can start back.

53:22 - Multiple Speakers
If you consider yourself successful with that, just come to my house.

53:29 - E. G.
I do that two or three times a day.

53:33 - Y. P.
Yeah, same here.

53:36 - Multiple Speakers
Sorry, I'm going after OpenAI.

53:39 - Y. P.
I break them left and right. In fact, I was sharing my agents just work while we are sleeping. And that's why, E., I've sent you an email already. I'm trying to build better orchestration or perhaps share what we have built and etc. See, imagine some automated tools continuously doing this. That's what we are doing to open AI until they say or come back to us or stop us from doing it. Auto agents are nothing but doing this. They're continuously going towards perfection. Sorry, did I stop you from saying something?

54:35 - D. B.
No, no, no. I'm just looking at what's in the chat. Oh, yeah, sorry.

54:41 - A. B.
I was just that that was, they had some additional information on it.

54:41 - A. B.
And it does look like that's what it's just kind of an LLM sitting on top of the library database service. So OK. So it's not, I don't think the LLM really is trained on that information. It's just kind of, it appears to be just kind of parsing and creating queries and summarizing results as it gets it back.

55:06 - Multiple Speakers
Think of it like a Google appliance that used to sit on your own database for searching. Yeah.

55:12 - D. B.
Well, that makes an interesting application of where they take an AI, as we're familiar with, and embed it as a component of a different system, right?

55:22 - A. B.
Oh, yeah. No. That's interesting. Makes a lot of sense. All right.

55:29 - D. B.
So I guess we will meet again in a couple of weeks. And I'll look forward to seeing you all then.

55:40 - Y. P.
Happy holidays. Take care.

55:42 - A. B.
Bye, everyone.

55:43 - Multiple Speakers
Happy holidays.

55:44 - L. G.
Bye, everybody.

55:45 - Unidentified Speaker
Bye.

55:46 - Y. P.
you


Friday, December 13, 2024

12/13/24: Using AI to write books & informational websites, etc.

  Machine Learning Study Group

Welcome! We meet from 4:00-4:45 p.m. Central Time. Anyone can join. Feel free to attend any or all sessions, or ask to be removed from the invite list as we have no wish to send unneeded emails of which we all certainly get too many. 
 Contacts: jdberleant@ualr.edu and mgmilanova@ualr.edu

Agenda & Minutes  (142nd meeting, Dec. 13, 2024

Table of Contents
* Agenda and minutes
* Transcript (when available)

Agenda and minutes
  • Announcements, updates, questions, presentations, etc.
    1. DB has found some masters students interested in the project below starting next semester for their masters degree project requirement. An important qualification for the student is to be able to attend these meetings weekly to update us on progress and get suggestions from all of us! 
      • Project description: Suppose a generative AI like ChatGPT or Claude.ai was used to write a book about a simply stated task, like "how to scramble an egg," "how to plant and care for a persimmon tree," "how to check and change the oil in your car," or any other question like that. Just ask the AI to provide a step by step guide, then ask it to expand on each step with substeps, then ask it to expand on each substep, continuing until you reached 100,000 words or whatever impressive target one might have.
        • LG: "How to bake a cake." Has some thoughts on the hallucination issue that AB mentioned.
        • ET: Gardening (veggies, herbs in particular). Specifically, growing vegetables from seeds. 
        • DD: Better to write about something you know something about.
        • YP: Prompt engineering would require looping, giving feedback, maybe agents would be useful. Youtube videos are available by subject matter experts. So you can familiarize with a topic that way.
        • MM: We could show examples of prompting using agents.
        • JK is focusing on prompt eng. with agents (but is not here today).
      • If anyone else has a project they would like to help supervise, let me know!
    2. JK submitted a video to AAAI 2024: video (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KJNQQU7IfSywljADxkGHMZuDkchbIc38/view?usp=sharing); call for videos (https://aaai.org/about-aaai/aaai-awards/aaai-educational-ai-videos). See also complex prompts, etc. (https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1uuG4P7puw8w2Cm_S5opis2t0_NF6gBCZ).
    3. NM: Updates/problems/questions on the process of turning the thesis into a publishable document using AI to help, while not having it look like it was AI generated and, more importantly, not having it overly AI generated to the extent that truth is compromised, while still using AI as an assistant as much as possible.
The meeting ended here.
    1. Here is a tool the library is providing. Some people here thought it would be a good idea to try it live during a meeting, so we can do that.

      Library trial of AI-driven product Primo Research Assistant

      The library is testing use of Primo Research Assistant, a generative AI-powered feature of Primo, the library's search tool. Primo Research Assistant takes natural-language queries and chooses academic resources from the library search to produce a brief answer summary and list of relevant resources. This video provides further detail about how the Assistant works.
      You can access Primo Research Assistant directly here, or, if you click "Search" below the search box on the library home page, you will see blue buttons for Research Assistant on the top navigation bar and far right of the Primo page that opens. You will be prompted to log in using your UALR credentials in order to use the Research Assistant.
       
    2. The campus has assigned a group to participate in the AAC&U AI Institute's activity "AI Pedagogy in the Curriculum." IU is on it and may be able to provide updates when available, every now and then but not every week.
    3. Anything else anyone would like to bring up?
  • Here are the latest on readings and viewings
    • Next we will continue to work through chapter 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M. We got up 15:50 awhile ago but it was indeed awhile ago so we started from the beginning and went to 15:50 again. Next time we do this video, we will go on from there. (When sharing the screen, we need to click the option to optimize for sharing a video.)
    • We can work through chapter 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc.
    • We can work through chapter 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jl0dxWQs8
    • Computer scientists win Nobel prize in physics! Https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf got a evaluation of 5.0 for a detailed reading.
    • We can evaluate https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10718663 for reading & discussion.
    • Chapter 6 recommends material by Andrej Karpathy, https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos for learning more.
    • Chapter 6 recommends material by Chris Olah, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chris+olah
    • Chapter 6 recommended https://www.youtube.com/c/VCubingX for relevant material, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1il-s4mgNdI
    • Chapter 6 recommended Art of the Problem, in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS90-FX6pg
    • LLMs and the singularity: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=ISHLLM&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FISHLLM.pdf (summarized at: https://poe.com/s/WuYyhuciNwlFuSR0SVEt). 6/7/24: vote was 4 3/7. We read the abstract. We could start it any time. We could even spend some time on this and some time on something else in the same meeting. 

Transcript:

ML discussion group  
Fri, Dec 13, 2024

7:23 - D. B.
All right. So anyway, if you're new here, we call this the Machine Learning study group or maybe machine learning discussion group. And it's every Friday at four. We're going to even meet next Friday, although the following Friday, probably not. And we talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence. So just to kind of announce or describe agenda item number one. So there's a number of students in our master's program, information science master's program, who would like to do a project of the following type. So they're gonna, you know, the idea is to use the generative AI, like ChatGPT, Cloud.AI, you know, Google Gemini, some other, whatever, okay? Or maybe a book with pictures, they could use a picture generating AI. But anyway, the intent is to write a book about some, you know, with some simple title or simply stated task, like how to scramble an egg, how to cook an egg, how to plant, care for your persimmon tree, how to check and change the oil in your car, how to read the dipstick for the oil in your car. That's not as easy as it sounds for some cars. Any other question like that? And it's just sort of an experimental idea of just what would be the experience of using an AI to a full length book about it, or an equivalent task, not write a book, but create a informational website that's equivalent in content to a book, okay? Since a lot of people check websites instead of reading books nowadays. Ultimately, I would like to see a book like that self-published on Amazon or a website put up for people to, for the world to, make use of and we'll see how that goes as part of the project. And it's basically a prompt engineering problem because you can't just tell the AI to write the book. You've got to step it through and provide some structure to the task and get it to do it. Okay, that's the question. How do you get it to do it? And I think it'll be really interesting to see how a number of different students, what their experiences are in doing that. And And I think other people here would like to see how that goes and provide suggestions and advice along the way. So really, the only real requirement for the students is that you be attending these meetings.

10:20 - A. B.
Because otherwise, we don't know what you're doing. Like how will the, is it on the student then to kind of validate the quality of the output, like, you know, along the way, or is it just to, like, I guess, so what if they, you know, we, you pick a topic and they, you know, you start compiling these different, you know, they're prompting and compiling these different outputs, like, is it on them as the onus on them to then kind of validate the, you know, is the information correct before bringing it back into the folder? Is that part of what we're measuring or just curious? Well, yeah.

11:01 - D. B.
I mean, one of the problems with using AI-generated text is that the AIs, when they don't know something, they'll make it up and it'll sound pretty convincing. That is a problem to which I do not have a solution, but I'm glad you raised it. And it's going to have to be addressed somehow, maybe not successfully, but it's a question that has to, you know, that will hover over the project.

11:28 - Unidentified Speaker
How about that? Yeah.

11:29 - A. B.
Is the AI, you know, how do you tell?

11:32 - D. B.
Because, you know, normally, you know, maybe, you know, many times you don't know the answer. So you're, yeah, so that is a question. And I'm glad you raised it. And we'll have to have to make that part of the project somehow. Or maybe not, we'll just come up with a book that sounds plausible, but has mistakes. Some real books have that too. I don't know, does anyone else have any thoughts on that? Okay, so let's see who the students are here. We'd like to welcome E. T.

12:16 - M. M.
Oh, okay.

12:17 - D. B.
I thought there were like four different, there were like four or five people, but only two people are here, which might make the project a little more manageable. So anyway, thanks for showing up and you're already among the few and the proud and you were the ones to show up. One of the, the question that I sort of sent you early on was to come up with some, some title or question or something that would be the subject of your of your book or website. And I'm going to turn it over to you folks and let you tell us what you came up with.

13:01 - L. G.
It's okay, I'll go first. Sure. With the idea of how to bake a cake, because it seems fairly simple, but it does have quite a few steps. And areas where you could, you know, get the ads, maybe do something different, right? And to Mr. Berry's question, I thought that one of the things we would be studying in the process are the hallucinations. So, you know, it's a part of the book, but it's also something that you can document and you can get some understanding about, or you could either try to do some prompt engineering around it and say, hey, I ran the question x these number of ways. And so, still get a hallucinogenic answer to it.

13:45 - D. B.
So I thought it was that kind of part of the project it could be addressed. Absolutely, yeah.

13:55 - Unidentified Speaker
I was thinking gardening.

13:58 - E. T.
I mean gardening is my hobby and I sort of have some of the knowledge on gardening. So simply gardening, growing vegetables or mostly vegetables or herbs seems easy, especially if you go get your plants, seedlings from the store. It's fairly easier compared to growing from seeds. But I was thinking growing. From seeds. Okay.

14:34 - D. B.
It has some steps and especially some for certain vegetables. Yes, you know, the little, the virtually nothing I know about growing plants from seeds is, you know, a lot of times you have to stratify and scarify, all these things, you have to do the seeds to make them grow. And then sometimes they don't grow. I don't know. It's just, I think that would be a book that I would find useful and interesting to read.

15:08 - E. T.
OK.

15:08 - D. B.
Those both sound really interesting to me. And I hope that we'll all learn a lot by seeing how the process goes and where it works, where it doesn't work, where hopefully people have some ideas to get things going again when you get stuck, if you get stuck. Yeah. All right. And are you okay with meeting all next semester and maybe the semester after that, assuming you're doing a two-semester project on these Fridays at four? Because that's kind of part of the plan.

15:46 - A. B.
I was just curious on what the strategy would be to get, because 100,000 words is a lot of words, right? Right. Yeah.

15:57 - D. B.
Well, you know, a hundred. Yeah. I think that would be a pretty long book, but you know, if it's 70,000, that's, that's book length too.

16:05 - A. B.
Right. Well, but I guess, is it like, would the strategy be something to the effect of, I don't know, like you kind of identify like the larger steps, whatever the process is you pick. And then like, then, you know, as you get those, like keep asking, like, so, you know, the, whatever, you know, get your flower and then like, you know, kind of continually prompt and ask it to elaborate, elaborate on like one of that, you know, get you on the first step and then, and then, you know, go on to the second step. And so for like, I'm just trying to think through how to logistically do that. Right. Cause if you just ask it to, how do you make a cake, it's going to give you like a, probably a pat answer out of, you know, that's going to be at a certain length.

16:50 - D. B.
Right.

16:50 - A. B.
So then how do you, How do you continually get it to draw that out longer and longer, I guess, is the question.

16:59 - D. D.
That's prompt engineering, isn't it?

17:01 - L. G.
I did try something just before volunteering to do this project, because it's kind of outside of what I thought. So let's say, for example, it said, hey, to make a cake, we need to turn on the oven to 375. And then I asked it, how would I turn on in the oven to 375.

17:22 - A. B.
And they need to give you a whole nother list. And my favorite one I tried was like, the second step was like, you would need to grease a pan. And I'm like, how do I grease a pan?

17:34 - L. G.
So the whole process, like you can use butter and you can do this. And I just kept trying to bring it down.

17:41 - A. B.
Or, you know, or if you say, or you could ask a question, like, is there something I could add to this step?

17:48 - L. G.
Like, Is it possible to use, you know, large degrees of paying for your cake? And then it'll give you some more information that you could then add. So I'm just kind of playing around with it from that kind of sequential thing, but I thought eventually you would need to say, okay, you have this, can you make it a paragraph? You know, instead of being a list.

18:07 - Multiple Speakers
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Well, and I get what you're saying.

18:11 - A. B.
I was just like, I wasn't, I was thinking that more around where you prompt it one prompt and you get an output then you know like what's the you'd have to do something like you have to ask more specific questions about each like granular step right to draw it out of this what I was trying to get to you know make sense yeah that does sound like a really good strategy that he's got one of the things that

18:35 - D. D.
like if I was going to undertake this project I would definitely write about something that I could already do And that way I could verify its response. So I would be, it would be like me taking, I would take, I'm going to write this book and I'm going to get ChatGPT to help me so I can write it faster. That's the way I would approach the problem.

19:00 - Multiple Speakers
And then I already know what I want.

19:03 - D. D.
And then I would just have the AI write it for me.

19:08 - Y. P.
is saying 100% whether it is machine learning or generative AI feedback loop. Somebody did mention isn't that prompt engineering and part of prompt engineering is better prompts and that's where you know the agents and automated agents are going where the agents know what to ask better automatically and then they continuously do that until, but that feedback loop and feedback loop is only possible when you know the subject matter that you are doing things or prompting about very well. I concur with that. And that's why, you know, I was talking to somebody who's researching And that's what I was trying to say that when you're building an agent, what you are building agent on perhaps is more important because that's how your agents will actually do the right agency, if I can say that. But I agree with what D. was saying. I just wanted to concur on that. J. is kind of the agents guy.

20:24 - D. B.
He's really getting, he's not here today, but he was really getting to this whole agents idea. But I have to admit that I'm a little in the dark about it.

20:39 - M. M.
This is extremely good approach. Like we show some examples of multi-agents and how they can do different tasks, subtasks. And this is how we can approach creating a good book.

20:56 - Y. P.
And in second week or third week of January, my team will demonstrate agents in the area of product development. And in fact, we will have a couple of people on from UL are joining that project from January as well. If things go well, we are kind of interviewing or assessing them. And we will demonstrate some concepts of agents. It's still not at the autonomous stage, that is phase two of the project, but we'll demonstrate some agents in the product development area. And concepts of the way, whether prompt engineering or feedback loop, everybody was saying, sorry, this is my car. Be big, I'm safe. But what I was was that we will try to demonstrate some aspects of it and coming to D.'s and I don't know who was saying about prompt engineering on that having that subject matter being an expert in something that you are building things on or if you are an engineer then having somebody who is an expert with you perhaps will help you to do that.

22:16 - D. B.
Well you know just getting back to the nuts and bolts of these master's projects, it's good to have, you need three people on your committee, three faculty members or similar to, you know, in the role of faculty members. And, you know, it's good to pick someone with some expertise in the area that you're doing your project, whether it's technical expertise or some other expertise. So like, you know, I don't know if there's any faculty members around that are avid, bakers or gardeners but if there were you know that or maybe someone in another department that that you know of that would be a good person to have on your committee um yeah that's right um well um e. or um uh l. do you have any Any other questions you want to ask us about or anything like that? Any other concerns?

23:23 - E. T.
I actually have some questions about how we're going to, I mean, what are the requirements? What is the expectation every week during the meeting? What do I need to get prepared? Yeah, I mean, this is a kind of a general purpose discussion group.

23:40 - Multiple Speakers
We cover a lot of different things, talk a lot about a lot different things at different times.

23:47 - D. B.
So this is not going to take over the meetings entirely, but I'd like to see some sort of a one minute progress update that we can either absorb or comment on or something. In other words, it's not going to be a big time sink for each meeting, but I'd like to see some progress. Of course, if you miss a meeting or you don't have for a week or something, of course you know everybody knows that's that's fine but you know you should be making progress all along steady progress throughout the two semesters

24:26 - E. T.
and and therefore have something brief to tell us about each time yes are you know are you taking a two semester sequence um actually that's that was the only So I need to complete my graduate project to be able to graduate. So I have one course left in my graduate project. I talked to Dr. Pierce at the beginning of the fall semester, and she was like, maybe register for one credit graduate project, and then this spring term, you would register for the two credits so it would add up to three credits and it would fulfill your graduate project requirement. However, the thing is the course I registered along with the one credit graduate project for the fall semester was intense and unfortunately I was not able to do anything toward my graduate project.

25:35 - D. B.
Which is why you're here this project.

25:38 - E. T.
Okay yeah well let me let me just say you know these kinds some some of the sort of advising issues we can discuss um you know outside the meeting but the important you know if if you're going to graduate

25:50 - D. B.
next semester you've got to you got to do the whole six credits or whatever is left to finish the project if you're going to graduate in two more semesters or include the summer then you should do it across across

26:03 - E. T.
two semesters. I see. That's my guideline. Yeah.

26:06 - D. B.
Better to do it across two semesters. But if you're graduating in a hurry, you got to do the whole thing at once.

26:14 - E. T.
So this is for two semesters, spring and summer. Am I right?

26:19 - D. B.
Well, if you're planning on graduating at the end of next summer, then you would do it over spring and summer.

26:27 - E. T.
If you want to graduate in to do the whole thing next semester. OK. Would it be possible to do it during the spring term?

26:37 - D. B.
If that's, yeah, that's something we should really discuss. It's kind of an advising issue. You send me an email, and we'll discuss it.

26:47 - Multiple Speakers
I will.

26:48 - E. T.
Thanks so much.

26:49 - D. B.
L., how about you? What's your situation?

26:52 - L. G.
Oh, OK. So I don't know if more or less complicated than hers. I have three hours remaining of the requirements. I have three hours left for the final project, but the first part of my, I guess we'll talk about the rest later, but the question I had was, I'm open to other questions, but just like, I believe it was Mr., I don't know which person said it, I felt like I wanted something that I would know kind of what, you know, when you get down the path, what the correct answer was. Right. But I am open to other topics if there's some that you guys think may be better topics. I do. I've played around with agents a little bit. And so I'm curious to see what they would do with that. But I think maybe I try to try it out a little bit over the next week to see how that would work.

27:49 - D. B.
I'm going to leave it up to you. I mean, I kind of agree that, you know, if you write about, if you do this about some topic that you know something about, you're gonna be able to catch the hallucinations better. But if you don't, you know, I'm just, you know, again, this is exploratory.

28:10 - L. G.
I'm just curious what's gonna happen, you know?

28:13 - Y. P.
And I'm a big fan of, I'm a big fan of students doing what's interesting to them.

28:19 - D. B.
So if you're really, on writing a book about something you don't know anything about, I would say go for it and let's just see what happens. Yeah. Okay. Any other comments on, yeah, go ahead.

28:37 - Y. P.
The one idea that I have that we are using is sometimes, I'm going to give an example. So for example, we are using Next.js as a framework, which we had never used, very difficult to find subject matter experts. So it's very difficult when you don't have subject matter experts, which I spoke about that knowing something that you are putting agents on is helpful. So what I would, or we did was, which is a trick, is in those cases, you can use YouTube videos, top YouTube videos, which you can, I would say, so for example, if somebody is doing, scrambled eggs or something like that, or gardening, you find the top 10 chefs or whoever who have been scrambled eggs, their videos, take a summary of that, YouTube videos, use Gemini to do that, or there are other tools to create a description. And you can use third parties or third party sources as your subject matter expert also. Just an idea that we use because we didn't have a subject matter expert. Or we had to build our subject matter expertise in Next.js, which is a new framework. But that's another idea that we used third party reliable sources, like for example, for scrambled eggs, it is reliable top chefs, right? If they have scrambled egg recipe, then you can depend on those recipes because they are the top chefs in the world. I just wanted to give idea that sometimes you may be asked to do something where you are not the subject matter experts but you can use these sources as if you have heard about RAC and create that environmental layer on top of it which becomes like a learning module and you can use that as your virtual subject matter expert. Just sharing an idea if somebody has to choose a topic they're not able to find something or somebody who is a subject matter expert.

31:22 - Unidentified Speaker
Thank you. Thank you.

31:25 - D. B.
Any other comments? Well, J is not here. I keep wanting to show this video that he submitted to the AAAI conference. I'd rather he sort of thought it'd be better if he's here, but I guess I could show it when he's not here. And the video stands on its own and it's pretty interesting video. So let me do that. And we can always ask him questions about it if he comes back some other time or whatever. Anyway, so he submitted this This is one of the major academic artificial intelligence conferences. It's been going on for 40 years or more. Anyway, this year, apparently, they have a video track where they're soliciting AI-generated videos, or I don't know what kind of videos exactly, but videos intended for a public audience. And J submitted one. Let's take a look. I'm gonna bring it up here and I may have to, actually, I need probably to unshare my screen and then optimize for video or something. Let me try that. I'm gonna optimize for a video clip. Reshare. Okay, I am sharing, am I not?

33:00 - D. D.
I do not see a video. There is no video.

33:04 - D. B.
Okay, but you see my page, right?

33:06 - Multiple Speakers
Yeah, I see your page.

33:08 - D. B.
Yes, you are currently sharing your page. All right, I'm gonna go to the video. Okay, do you see the purple? We do. Okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and play it, you know. This is from J. J submitted it. He made it. I'm going to go ahead with it.

33:27 - Unidentified Speaker
A lot of people view generative AI as a threat to creativity, that it's going to replace artists. But I think it's going to have the opposite effect. It's going to make us more successful than ever. Artists who learn prompt engineering, which is just the technical term for communicating with AI, can build a team of mentors and collaborators. For example, if you use a prompt like, you are an expert grant writer for independent painters, based on my work, please walk me through the process of filling out this application. You can put that prompt into chat GPT, and because you've told it that it's an expert grant writer, it's gonna be able to act as that expert. Same thing if you say, you're a publicist for photographers, please help me plan my social media strategy. This kind of mentorship used to only be available to the top tier of creators. Now everyone can have a world-class art coach.

34:34 - Y. P.
Generative AI is also multimodal, meaning that it can produce text, images, audio, and video.

34:41 - Unidentified Speaker
So it can complement your work as a collaborator. Let's say you're a musician. You are really passionate producing your music, but now you can team up with AI to generate album art, create music videos, and produce writing that complements your work in a way that you couldn't do before. So AI isn't going to replace what we do best, it's going to amplify it. No matter what your style, medium, income, location is, you now have the opportunity to reach audiences that you wouldn't have otherwise and have a greater shot at producing art successfully full-time. So I guess what I'm saying is, it's not gonna replace us, it's gonna empower us. Oops, trying to catch that.

35:36 - D. B.
Yeah, because it says what methods you used.

35:41 - R. S.
Some of those I haven't heard before.

35:45 - D. B.
Yeah.

35:46 - R. S.
Cling AI, Suno AI, and 11 labs. OK. But I mean, match between the text and images.

35:57 - M. M.
There is no exactly kind of link between the text and images, but otherwise the text is wonderful. The images. OK.

36:13 - D. B.
Images are kind of random. I mean, they're kind of fun, but they're not...

36:19 - M. M.
Not related to the text.

36:22 - D. B.
Yeah, there's a loose connection, I guess.

36:25 - M. M.
Yeah. Well, that is good. I can see V is here and V has a very good design experience. Maybe one moment he will share with us now or later, V?

36:39 - V. W.
I was just enjoying seeing... I enjoyed seeing J's video for the second time because it has an impressionistic quality that I didn't appreciate the first time. I had been in a similar situation where I was trying to give life to some disparate ideas using and when you use runway, you can take an image that's on task for what you're trying to do, and then you can give it a prompt and you get a three or four second video out of it. And then you string those together like a storyboard and you've got content. So I thought it was very creative. You know, J is a science fiction writer, among other things, and I could see that influence in his artwork. So, yeah, this week I signed up for the two hundred dollar a month chat GPT pro, and it is truly the road to perdition because I found it so engaging. And it was like having a superpower king for a day or something like that. And so I just I just chose a task that I thought would be interesting. And I kept making progress I didn't expect to make. And it was really fun and very, very exciting. And it wore me completely out.

37:52 - D. B.
I'm still recovering from it, so. Well, if it wore you out, that means you weren't just sort of lazily letting AI do the work. You were sort of more truly part of an active part of the larger Yeah, it's like having a brainstorm that won't stop.

38:11 - V. W.
It's because whatever you can come up with, it amplifies it. And then the the relationship, as J points out, is. It's it's incredible because you're able to do all these things you always wanted to do that you thought might take a year, you can do them in seconds or moments or, you know, minutes or hours. And it's a very intoxicating adrenalizing type of activity and like what E said you know the AI is changing us and I'm not completely sure. I think it's something we're gonna have to learn to manage.

38:52 - D. B.
So Dr.

38:53 - Y. P.
W., can you share something about what was so different between the $20 and $200 if you with some example or something. Now you've got me excited to sign up for 200 and try something. Right.

39:09 - V. W.
I totally recommend that you do that because you can, well, I was told that you could back out of it if you wanted to, but I shouldn't advertise that as being true because I don't know for a fact that it's true. I just heard or read a report about it and it said so. So, you know, this is a do it your own risk kind of activity, But I would recommend that you work in an area that you're very familiar with so that you can judge the quality. And also, you can take these giant steps. Whereas before in programming, we design top down, but then we implement bottom up a line of code at a time. And I just wasn't used to developing 100 lines of high quality code. Over 100 lines of high quality code an hour is just a thrilling experience. Because it's such a the right it's a right question so it I think it lights up your whole brain and yeah I still I'm still coping with what happened I remember it being very exciting just the whole it was

40:16 - Y. P.
so exciting I continued doing it for 12 hours and so you know I'm not sure that's completely a good idea yeah and most likely that will happen to me too if you are that excited but I'm I'm curious I'm I'm going to use it now I may have some feedback about this my personal because I was like this paid one basic one is helping me so much how much great it would be but it seemed like there is a lot of value I'm trying to see what that value is I kept running I kept running against limits early on when trying to program with it.

41:00 - V. W.
You have to kind of babysit it. You have to figure out how you're going to talk to it so it doesn't forget what you're talking about. And that is to some degree been released. What I found out by sort of hard, the school of hard knocks was that it cannot deliver back to you in one gulp the complete rehash of what you've just talked about. So I was able to go to 20 shots, just getting a monolithic response. But then at 20 shots, we had to break the project up into eight chunks because it couldn't deliver all the content that had been accumulated because it was even past the 200 a month buffer length. But what was nice that I didn't realize before is that it had retained state information that it had simply forgotten before. So it's like you have access to a larger persistent state of consciousness, but you still have to get that back out in bite-sized chunks. It's a little bit like a person who's in a coma and you say blink once for yes and twice for no or something, except the chunk size is much bigger than a blink, but there's still this, there's still a

42:15 - Multiple Speakers
bottleneck on communication that it can't, you know, it can't completely flush out everything you've done every time. Does it have capability to build agents, automated agents or anything like that?

42:26 - Y. P.
No, actually.

42:27 - V. W.
Well, the right answer is I don't know, because I had to build it took me an hour to build the prompt for what I wanted. I gave it a loose description of what I wanted that had all the facets I thought were important. But then I said, please interview me. In each of these areas of graphical user interface and geometry and all the user interface subtleties that make a program usable with low user friction. And then it spent about an hour asking me questions that I answered as completely as I could. And then it created an eight point multi-page summary of what we were going to embark on. And then and only then did we embark on the first step of the eight step steps to try to get a version running one chunk at a time, which we did. Got it. Thank you.

43:24 - D. B.
So I'm wondering, you know, $200 a month sounds like a lot, so I'm glad they offered you a free two weeks or whatever. But, you know, if you're using it for your job, like you're something or, you know, professionally, it doesn't take that much an improvement in productivity to make it worthwhile. I mean, when you think about, like, take a professor, for example, $200 to me sounds like a lot to be spending on something for fun. But, you know, if it could save, you know, if it saved me several hours a month in time preparing classes or something like that, you know, it'd be worthwhile.

44:09 - V. W.
For example, a professional video editor will cost you $400 an hour to sit with them and put together content that's important to you. Or if you want to rent an airplane, it's going to be $120 an hour for the airplane and 50 for the gas. And so that's per hour. And so here we have something for 200 a month. So I asked myself if I work 12 hours a day for 30 days, it only works out to like a couple of dollars an hour. And so since it's like having a heavy machine tool in your shop, you have to pay for having this heavy machine tool there. But if you're always using this giant lathe to make stuff, then it sort of becomes absorbed into the cost of doing business. And this is like, it's so on the center line of exactly what it is we're doing in knowledge engineering and understanding what these tools are capable of, and acting as extensions of ourselves that it's, it's the only thing I'm

45:09 - Unidentified Speaker
missing is more hours in the day to consume it and, or use it. It's a lot of fun.

45:18 - V. W.
Yeah.

45:19 - D. B.
Or if you're, if you're a programmer, if it makes you 10% more productive, 15% more productive, it was probably a boost your professional career.

45:34 - V. W.
or it's more like 10 times more productive, which makes it a little bit addictive because remember you're used to struggling to get, well, you know, they say at JPL, the average programmer built four lines of code a day. And I thought, well, that's silly. Most people I know can do a hundred lines of code a day, but then it was like, well, you can now do a hundred lines of code in an hour. So you're eight to 10 times more productive. So that's allowing you to cover ground that you couldn't cover before intellectually because it's all in front of you.

46:05 - R. S.
Are you using artificial intelligence to generate 100 lines of code an hour? Yes.

46:13 - V. W.
But you have to guide those 100. I mean, you totally have to steer it.

46:20 - D. B.
But here's the thing I was thinking about.

46:24 - V. W.
It was like being able to have a magic wand And instead of saying how I wanted something done, I could say what I wanted done and the how you get for free. So it's like being a manager who can take a magic wand and simply illuminate tasks that you want done and then poof, they exist. And now what are you gonna do? And there were a couple of points where I had to do off task activities to complete the main thread. Like I had to build an airfoil database. And so I said, I don't really feel like doing an Air Force database. So give me a bash script that'll create a directory and populate it with these data files for these airfoils. And so I said, oh, okay, I'll do that. It built me the bash script. I ran the bash script and now I have the thing. It was like, kabam that we, I mean, I could have done it manually, but it would just took all that heavy lifting out of the equation and just allowed me to have the thing I needed right now. And I wondered like, it's like being a man, a total manager instead of just a grunt who's shaving off one piece of code at a time, like you're whittling or something.

47:39 - D. B.
Another question I have is, so J is into this idea of telling the AI, maybe you are too, V, telling the AI, you are an expert in gardening, tell me how to garden, as opposed to just prompt, like, just tell me how to garden. Does telling the AI you are a world-class expert make it do better?

48:05 - V. W.
Well, to me, the task factored a little bit differently. It was like saying, I want a hundred rows of corn now. Like it says, poof, you have a hundred rows of corn, now what? It's like, you already have the garden. That you can conceive of, you are just a few moments away from possessing. So that's an odd sort of superpower to have, and you have to actually learn how to use the superpower. So I spent a lot of time having it ask me to construct things. Then we ran into a weird misunderstanding about a couple hours in, and neither one of us knew where the misunderstanding was. And when we finally found it, it was extremely illuminating and got rid of a bug. And it had to do with the conversion from SI to imperial units, display calculations and internal calculations. And we had to make policies like internally, we always use SI units, but the user can see imperial units if they want, but those are not the internal versions. And we had to make these policies. So we jointly created policies that would simplify the code and make the chance for errors go away. And so then the error went away and it was a very kind of collaboration like you have at a meeting where a project is run behind, people are in trouble, they don't know exactly why things aren't going well, mythical man month, Fred Brooks and all that. And then you just have this deep discussion, knock down, drag out, fight to get at what is the problem here. And then when it's solved, it's incredibly like uplifting. So I got into one of those kinds of troubles. So, and then I got it. But the nice thing was, is instead of being in that trouble, you get into trouble, you recognize the trouble, maybe you've over-constrained the problem description, and that over-constraint is showing up later as having made something you thought was easy impossible, because there's a built-in contradiction in these conflicting goals that you've specified, but you haven't realized that embedded in your goals is this conflict, and then in the process of doing it, you understand the presence of this conflict, you resolve You create a policy to resolve the conflict and that process can usually take weeks or months and often are accompanied with tears and budget overruns and difficulties. And to be able to get through that in moments instead of months is very empowering. It's just, yeah, I was joking with my hand radio friends. This is the road to partition because it's so uplifting and empowering.

50:37 - D. B.
All right, well, we're kind of running out of time. Mentioned something that I'd like to spend a few more minutes on like next week. So N. is here and he's like to turn his master's thesis into a publishable article. And the idea that I sort of propose is to use AI to do it as much as possible, but not have it look like it was AI generated. Because otherwise, you know, publishers aren't gonna like it potentially. But more importantly, you don't want to have it so overly AI generated that its truth is compromised, but yet you want to use AI as much as possible. So that was the sort of task I posed for N., and I think I'd like him to address it next week for a few moments, although we're kind of out of time for this week.

51:31 - V. W.
That's a great task.

51:32 - N. M.
In a short but quick explanation, I did all the work I had all the research. I can explain things in my own way, but a lot of people fail to understand how I'm explaining it. So I put all the research into ChatGPT, point by point, and say, rewrite. Here's my work. Rewrite this to make it more comprehensive. Right. And having it not let...

52:00 - V. W.
I have to often discipline the AI not to take away my voice. And it can use previous interactions that it's had with you. It can use the personal profile that you can build with chat GPT to make sure that it's staying on voice. And often, especially when you use a lesser AI like Grammarly, it'll try to rewrite some words or phrases of emphasis that are not you, and you have to not let it do that. But also AI and the large can do that. And you can almost start reading it when it gets too flowery or too descriptive or too complete, It lacks that human feeling, and people will kind of tune out of it because they can feel it's automated.

52:42 - Multiple Speakers
It's automated. It's generated. It's whatever.

52:45 - D. D.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think that my approach would be to try to get the model to teach me how to write better and then write better.

52:59 - Multiple Speakers
That's how I would approach this. I wouldn't have the AI write a single word that I used. Well, that's not true. That's a little over.

53:08 - D. D.
I wouldn't want it writing complete sentences on its own. I think you've identified the crucial thing of chunk size.

53:15 - V. W.
If you write a whole big paper and then you feed it to AI and say, now make a decent paper out of this, the chunk size is so big that you're going to get you overwritten with it. But if you hand it smaller crafted chunks and say, these to reflect very specific lexical and semantic goals that I have. Let's just get that piece tightened up. Then when you make those a brick at a time, accumulate, you get something that reflects your own creativity and not just the AI slop.

53:47 - N. M.
Yes, that's exactly what I did. I didn't feed it the whole paper. If I was talking about the flaws of the H-index, let's say, because that's what my paper was about, I would give it one point. I'd give it the information that I collected, the research I've done about one point of the falls. I'd say, rewrite this and make it more comprehensive. Then I would deal with the next one and the next one and the next one.

54:15 - V. W.
I wouldn't give it the whole thing because I knew it would eventually merge something or make it into a format that I would not like, It'll tear stuff up.

54:26 - Unidentified Speaker
Exactly.

54:26 - N. M.
Exactly. Well, thanks, everybody.

54:28 - D. B.
And I guess we'll go ahead and meet next week. But the following week is going to be kind of whatever. We'll see. But we're going to meet next week. And we'll go from there.

54:43 - V. W.
Awesome.

54:43 - D. B.
So everybody, have a good weekend. And we'll see you back soon.

54:48 - Multiple Speakers
Great meeting, guys.

54:49 - N. M.
Thanks. Thank you. Bye, everyone.