Jay Alammar, director and Engineering Fellow at Cohere, joins Ben Lorica to talk about building AI applications for the enterprise, using RAG effectively, and the evolution of RAG into agents. Listen in to find out what kinds of metadata you need when you’re onboarding a new model or agent; discover how an emphasis on evaluation helps an organization improve its processes; and learn how to take advantage of the latest code-generation tools.

Timestamps

• 0:00: Introduction to Jay Alammar, director at Cohere. He’s also the author of Hands-On Large Language Models.
• 0:30: What has changed in how you think about teaching and building with LLMs?
• 0:45: This is my fourth year with Cohere. I really love the opportunity because it was a chance to join the team early (around the time of GPT-3). Aidan Gomez, one of the cofounders, was one of the coauthors of the transformers paper. I’m a student of how this technology went out of the lab and into practice. Being able to work in a company that’s doing that has been very educational for me. That’s a little of what I use to teach. I use my writing to learn in public.
• 2:20: I assume there’s a big difference between learning in public and teaching teams within companies. What’s the big difference?
• 2:36: If you’re learning on your own, you have to run through so much content and news, and you have to mute a lot of it as well. This industry moves extremely fast. Everyone is overwhelmed by the pace. For adoption, the important thing is to filter a lot of that and see what actually works, what patterns work across use cases and industries, and write about those.
• 3:25: That’s why something like RAG proved itself as one application paradigm for how people should be able to use language models. A lot of it is helping people cut through the hype and get to what’s actually useful, and raise AI awareness. There’s a level of AI literacy that people need to come to grips with.
• 4:10: People in companies want to learn things that are contextually relevant. For example, if you’re in finance, you want material that will help deal with Bloomberg and those types of data sources, and material aware of the regulatory environment.
• 4:38: When people started being able to understand what this kind of technology was capable of doing, there were multiple lessons the industry needed to understand. Don’t think of chat as the first thing you should deploy. Think of simpler use cases, like summarization or extraction. Think about these as building blocks for an application.
• 5:28: It’s unfortunate that the name “generative AI” came to be used because the most important things AI can do aren’t generative: they’re the representation with embeddings that enable better categorization, better clustering, and enabling companies to make sense of large amounts of data. The next lesson was to not rely on a model’s information. In the beginning of 2023, there were so many news stories about the models being a search engine. People expected the model to be truthful, and they were surprised when it wasn’t. One of the first solutions was RAG. RAG tries to retrieve the context that will hopefully contain the answer. The next question was data security and data privacy: They didn’t want data to leave their network. That’s where private deployment of models becomes a priority, where the model comes to the data. With that, they started to deploy their initial use cases.
• 8:04: Then that system can answer systems to a specific level of difficulty—but with more difficulty, the system needs to be more advanced. Maybe it needs to search for multiple queries or do things over multiple steps.
• 8:31: One thing we learned about RAG was that just because something is in the context window doesn’t mean the machine won’t hallucinate. And people have developed more appreciation of applying even more context: GraphRAG, context engineering.