Nicolay Gerold

“ The agent runs in a loop of Thought, Action, Observation, Thought, ... The Thought and Action (with the Action Input to the action) are the parts which are generated by an LLM The Observation is generated by using a tool (for example the print outputs of Python or the text result of a Google search)”

Really neat to see the parallels to OODA loops,... See more

Disruptive innovation comes in two flavors: (1) New-market disruption, where the company creates and claims a new segment in an existing market by catering to an underserved customer base, or (2) Low-end disruption, in which a company uses a low-cost business model to enter at the bottom of an existing market and claim a segment.

Copilots don’t... See more

People don't want the truth.

I recently helped a client build a PDF report generator that took about five minutes to run - and the users hated it.

So I had the application throw up a fake dialog with fake messages about "Collating data, Validating setup, Sorting, Generating" and other such nonsense.

The PDF generation now took eight minutes to run... See more

Very simply, Jevons Paradox states: if the demand is elastic and the price drops, the demand will more than make up for it. Normally, far more than make up for it. This is absolutely the case of the internet. You get more value and more productivity. I personally believe when it comes to any creative asset or work automation, the demand is elastic.... See more

Long-term stress invokes positive feedback loops triggering over-eating. Ashwaganda can decrease cortisol levels but can have averse effects with habitual use. Apigenine can calm the nervous system. Both can be infested before bed.

So right now, LLMs (Large Language Models) are all the rage. But in the future, it’s possible that the way we get things done is composing things with a combination of LLMs, SMMs (Small, Mighty Models), agents and tools.

It’s what I call Cognitive Composition (because it sounds cool and I have a longtime love affair with alliteration).

This is how we... See more

LLMs struggle when handling tasks which require extensive knowledge. This limitation highlights the need to supplement LLMs with non-parametric knowledge. This paper Prompting Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering Involving Long-tail Facts analyze the effects of different types of non-parametric knowledge, such as... See more

Principles for growable tools

There are three critical pieces to building a tool that can grow around its users over time.

1. Design around play . Sometimes I call this design around experimentation . Using the tool for day-to-day work should involve playing and experimenting with what’s possible with the tool. Whether that’s writing small programs to

... See more

Fast, Simple, In-Memory Nearest Neighbor Search

Voyager provides approximate nearest-neighbor search in Python and Java. It's up to 10 times faster than Annoy, while using 4 times less memory and providing more features.