Developing Rapidly with Generative AI

We consider these aspects of our problem:

• Latency : How fast does the system need to respond to user input?


• Task Complexity : What level of understanding is required from the LLM? Is the input context and prompt super domain-specific?


• Prompt Length : How much context needs to be provided for the LLM to do its task?


• Quality : What is the acceptable

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When it comes to identifying where generative AI can make an impact, we dig into challenges that commonly:

• Involve analysis, interpretation, or review of unstructured content (e.g. text) at scale


• Require massive scaling that may be otherwise prohibitive due to limited resources


• Would be challenging for rules-based or traditional ML approaches

The exact metrics we use depend on the application — our main goal is to understand how users use the feature and quickly make improvements to better meet their needs. For internal applications, this might mean measuring efficiency and sentiment. For consumer-facing applications, we similarly focus on measures of user satisfaction - direct user fee... See more

A solution is to self-host an open-sourced or custom fine-tuned LLM. Opting for a self-hosted model can reduce costs dramatically - but with additional development time, maintenance overhead, and possible performance implications. Considering self-hosted solutions requires weighing these different trade-offs carefully.

To do this, we employ a technique known as AI-assisted evaluation, alongside traditional metrics for measuring performance. This helps us pick the prompts that lead to better quality outputs, making the end product more appealing to users. AI-assisted evaluation uses best-in-class LLMs (like GPT-4) to automatically critique how well the AI's output... See more

We generally lean towards picking more advanced commercial LLMs to quickly validate our ideas and obtain early feedback from users. Although they may be expensive, the general idea is that if problems can't be adequately solved with state-of-the-art foundational models like GPT-4, then more often than not, those problems may not be addressable usin... See more

Setting up the necessary machine learning infrastructure to run these big models is another challenge. We need a dedicated model server for running model inference (using frameworks like Triton oder vLLM), powerful GPUs to run everything robustly, and configurability in our servers to make sure they're high throughput and low latency. Tuning the in... See more