Whoa this is an amazing idea! Thanks for implementing it.
Is there some rule that determines which daemons chime in on which lines, or is it purely random?
Warning for others: don’t open Pantheon in two browser tabs at once and then go ahead to write stuff in one of them, expecting it to get saved—when you close the browser, it might also save the contents from the tab that you wrote almost nothing in, overwriting the storage that has more. (This is not a criticism, I imagine this to be tricky to fix and I should’ve thought of it myself.)
Viewing the chain-of-thought for some of the daemons, I felt like a lot of ideas they had come up with in the first stage were better questions than the ones they finally settled on. (Unfortunately, I can’t show examples because I lost the state.) Possibly this was because I was hoping to use it for brainstorming some ideas, and some responses that I would have found useful would have been the bots just asking follow-up questions about specific ideas I had. But since those questions were relatively obvious, they were ranked low on the “surprisingness” metrics. This makes me think that besides the choice of daemons, there could also be a setting for what kinds of comments you might find the most useful (that would swap between sets of chain-of-thought prompts) - in some contexts it’s useful to also hear the obvious comments/questions, whereas in some other it’s not. For now I’ll just edit the chain-of-thought prompts manually.
Currently completely random yes. We experimented with a more intelligent “daemon manager,” but it was hard to make one which didn’t have a strong universal preference for some daemons over others (and the hacks we came up with to try to counteract this favoritism became increasingly convoluted). It would be great to find an elegant solution to this.
Good point! Thanks for letting people know.
I’ve also had that problem, and whenever I look through the suggestions I often feel like there were many good questions/comments that got pruned away. The reason to focus on surprise was mainly to avoid the repetitiveness caused by mode collapse, where the daemon gets “stuck” giving the same canned responses. This is a crude instrument though, since as you say, just because a response isn’t surprising, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
Simple randomness seems bad because it’ll lead to oversampling some daemons and starving others. Why not simply rotate through a shuffled list? (The user could also drag-and-drop an order of speakers.)
We experimented with a more intelligent “daemon manager”...It would be great to find an elegant solution to this.
Seems like ideally you’d want something like a Mixture of Experts approach—a small, fast model that gets info about which daemons are best at what, along with your most recent input, and picks the right one.
Whoa this is an amazing idea! Thanks for implementing it.
Is there some rule that determines which daemons chime in on which lines, or is it purely random?
Warning for others: don’t open Pantheon in two browser tabs at once and then go ahead to write stuff in one of them, expecting it to get saved—when you close the browser, it might also save the contents from the tab that you wrote almost nothing in, overwriting the storage that has more. (This is not a criticism, I imagine this to be tricky to fix and I should’ve thought of it myself.)
Viewing the chain-of-thought for some of the daemons, I felt like a lot of ideas they had come up with in the first stage were better questions than the ones they finally settled on. (Unfortunately, I can’t show examples because I lost the state.) Possibly this was because I was hoping to use it for brainstorming some ideas, and some responses that I would have found useful would have been the bots just asking follow-up questions about specific ideas I had. But since those questions were relatively obvious, they were ranked low on the “surprisingness” metrics. This makes me think that besides the choice of daemons, there could also be a setting for what kinds of comments you might find the most useful (that would swap between sets of chain-of-thought prompts) - in some contexts it’s useful to also hear the obvious comments/questions, whereas in some other it’s not. For now I’ll just edit the chain-of-thought prompts manually.
Thanks!
Replying in order:
Currently completely random yes. We experimented with a more intelligent “daemon manager,” but it was hard to make one which didn’t have a strong universal preference for some daemons over others (and the hacks we came up with to try to counteract this favoritism became increasingly convoluted). It would be great to find an elegant solution to this.
Good point! Thanks for letting people know.
I’ve also had that problem, and whenever I look through the suggestions I often feel like there were many good questions/comments that got pruned away. The reason to focus on surprise was mainly to avoid the repetitiveness caused by mode collapse, where the daemon gets “stuck” giving the same canned responses. This is a crude instrument though, since as you say, just because a response isn’t surprising, doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
Simple randomness seems bad because it’ll lead to oversampling some daemons and starving others. Why not simply rotate through a shuffled list? (The user could also drag-and-drop an order of speakers.)
Seems like ideally you’d want something like a Mixture of Experts approach—a small, fast model that gets info about which daemons are best at what, along with your most recent input, and picks the right one.