Almost Timely News: A Large Language Model Power Technique (2024-03-17) :: View in Browser
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What’s On My Mind: A Large Language Model Power Technique
This week, I’m going to share with you one power technique that will dramatically increase your productivity and accuracy when using large language models, like the ones that power ChatGPT and similar software. But before I delve into the technique itself, we need to go over some very basic foundational aspects of transformer-based models.
Large language models have two conceptual types of memory. This explanation is mathematically incorrect, so know that from the beginning, if you go read the relevant academic papers and you do the calculus yourself, this is not how the models mechanically work under the hood. But for now, this is a good conceptual model to remember.
Like you and me, language models have two kinds of memory, long-term and short-term. Long-term memory, also known by the fancy technical term latent space, is the statistical library of everything the model was trained on. To be clear, the original documents it was trained from are NOT in its long-term memory. Instead, a model’s long-term memory is essentially a bunch of associations. It’s seen “I pledge allegiance to the” so many times that it can predict with near-mathematical certainty that the next word in the sentence should be flag, at least in North American English.
In general, the long-term memory of a language model is very large and diverse. It’s seen everything from the most credentialed academic papers to your drunk uncle’s Reddit shitposts, and it has learned language patterns from it (this is why all models have biases). The process of building that long-term memory is so intensive and expensive that companies rarely do it. When they do, there’s usually a big announcement, like when GPT-4, Claude 3, or Gemini 1.5 were announced, to much fanfare. This is why models often warn that they only have knowledge up to a certain date.
The short-term memory of a language model starts empty. It’s the memory used during a conversation, so when you first open up a browser window to Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, there’s literally nothing there. The short-term memory is governed by some internal mechanics, but all models have a defined short-term memory; after you reach the limit of that memory, it starts forgetting the earliest parts of your conversation. How short is short-term memory? For some models, like the open-source LLaMa 2 model, the memory is as little as 2,200 words. For other models, like Claude 3 Opus and the upcoming Google Gemini 1.5, it’s as large as 700,000 words. Big or small, eventually models do run out of memory and delete the earliest information in their memories.
What makes transformers-based models – which is basically almost all language models today – different from their predecessors is a technical concept called attention. Without getting into details, the short conceptual summary is that attention means a model takes into account everything in its short-term memory to help predict what it’s going to say next. Everything in our prompt and subsequent conversations is used by the model for what it generates next.
I often call language models the smartest, most forgetful interns you’ve ever worked with. Their knowledge in their long-term memories is substantial, more than any human could know. Their short-term memory means they have to constantly be reminded of what they know, even within the space of a single conversation.
So, with that somewhat technical background, let’s talk about this prompting power technique. It goes like this:
What do you know about this topic?
Kind of anti-climactic, isn’t it? Let’s see what it looks like in practice so we can see the value of it. I’ll start with the basic RACE framework prompt (grab the free, no form or data required PDF here):
You are an expert virologist and epidemiologist. You know viruses, viral replication, RNA, mRNA, protein structures, spike proteins, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, COVID variants, and immune escape. Your first task is to explain the importance of position 13,468 on Open Reading Frame 1ab of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its significance for immunity.
That prompt fulfills the basic RACE framework. Let’s see what a model like ChatGPT says:
And for good measure, let’s see what Google Gemini says:
What’s important to note here is that both models have failed to mention the most salient fact about ORF1ab and position 13,468: it’s the mutation of the current COVID variant.
Now, let’s add our power technique:
You are an expert virologist and epidemiologist. You know viruses, viral replication, RNA, mRNA, protein structures, spike proteins, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, COVID variants, and immune escape. Your first task is to explain the importance of position 13,468 on Open Reading Frame 1ab of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its significance for immunity. What do you know about this topic?
Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say:
and Gemini:
In both cases, the query that ends with asking it what it knows delivers more detailed results. That alone is helpful. However, more important is the continued omission of the basic fact that the JN.1 variant is why this mutation is so significant.
What does that tell us? Right out of the gate, it tells us that the long-term memory of these models does NOT have any information about the JN.1 variant, which in turn means that if we want to use generative AI for this topic, we will need to supply that information ourselves. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why subject matter expertise and human review still matter a great deal. To the untrained eye, these responses might look fine, but for anyone in virology, these are deeply deficient responses.
Second, if we were to proceed, then the short-term memory already has quite a bit more information in it. Remember that these transformers-based models take into account everything within the short-term memory, so by asking a model what it knows, we’ve effectively multiplied the length of the starting prompt by several times.
Let’s take something that requires a bit less current knowledge to further illustrate the point. Suppose you are a real estate agent and you want to write up a description of a property for sale. Let’s say these are the basics of the property:
- 2 bedrooms, 1 full bath
- House built in 1920
- House in terrible condition but livable
- 6 rooms total
- 4770 square foot lot
- $4,064 annual taxes
- Seller asking $440,000
- House has 1,122 square feet total with a shingle roof, block foundation, bungalow style
- House has city water and sewer
- Not in a particularly nice part of the city
- Houses selling fast in the city, only 10 single family homes available in the entire city of 70,000 people, very hot market
Now, if you were to use a language model with the RACE framework to prompt it to write a property description, it might go like this:
You are a top-selling real estate agent. You know real estate, realtors, house sales, single family homes, residential real estate, buyer’s agent, seller’s agent. Your first task, as the seller’s agent for a property, is to write a compelling description of this house to attract potential buyers. Here are the details: (paste in the list above) Write a compelling housing description.
What kind of description will we get?
Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say:
and Gemini:
These descriptions aren’t bad, but the models don’t have much to work with in the prompt, so what they come up with is a bit bland, generic, and dry.
Now, let’s start the conversation a little differently, using our power technique.
You are a top-selling real estate agent. You know real estate, realtors, house sales, single family homes, residential real estate, buyer’s agent, seller’s agent. Your first task, as the seller’s agent for a property, is to write a compelling description of this house to attract potential buyers. What do you know about the best practices for writing compelling real estate property descriptions to attract the attention of buyers?
Each model will tell us what it knows about the topic and some general best practices. What it’s doing as well is filling in what’s basically a very long prompt filled with the general best practices.
Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say:
and Gemini:
Now, with these pre-loaded expert prompts, let’s take a look at the revised listings.
Let’s see what ChatGPT has to say:
and Gemini:
Qualitatively, these responses are not just a little better, they’re a lot better. There’s still definitely some tweaking to do to make them better listings, but you can see just how including the basic best practices – pulled from the model’s long-term memory – into the conversation made for a better result.
Naturally, if your firm has a specific style of writing, or you have a database of listings that sold really fast, you’d want to include that context as well to create exactly the kind of output you want.
Asking a model what it knows about a topic is a fast way to tell whether or not the model is even capable of generating correct outputs, and pre-loading the conversation with rich information that substantially improves what it generates. Add this into your workflow to make your work with generative AI and large language models much better.
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ICYMI: In Case You Missed it
Besides the new Generative AI for Marketers course I’m relentlessly flogging, I did a four-part series this week as a reaction video to an OLD talk I did on podcast marketing back in 2007.
- Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 1/4
- Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 2/4
- Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 3/4
- Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 4/4
- Almost Timely News, March 10, 2024: The Intelligence Revolution
- So What? How To Migrate Your Universal Analytics
- In-Ear Insights: Predictive Analytics and Reducing Churn
Skill Up With Classes
These are just a few of the classes I have available over at the Trust Insights website that you can take.
Premium
- 🦾 Generative AI for Marketers
- 👉 Google Analytics 4 for Marketers
- 👉 Google Search Console for Marketers (🚨 just updated with AI SEO stuff! 🚨)
Free
- Powering Up Your LinkedIn Profile (For Job Hunters) 2023 Edition
- Predictive Analytics and Generative AI for Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality, 2024 Edition
- Building the Data-Driven, AI-Powered Customer Journey for Retail and Ecommerce, 2024 Edition
- The Marketing Singularity: How Generative AI Means the End of Marketing As We Knew It
- Measurement Strategies for Agencies
- Empower Your Marketing With Private Social Media Communities
- Exploratory Data Analysis: The Missing Ingredient for AI
- How to Prove Social Media ROI
- Proving Social Media ROI
- Paradise by the Analytics Dashboard Light: How to Create Impactful Dashboards and Reports
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Get Back to Work
Folks who post jobs in the free Analytics for Marketers Slack community may have those jobs shared here, too. If you’re looking for work, check out these recent open positions, and check out the Slack group for the comprehensive list.
- Brand Ambassador at BUILD Magazine
- Content Strategist at Growgetter
- Data Science Specialist at eTeam
- Digital Marketing Analyst at The IRONMAN Group
- Digital Performance Analyst For Site/Marketing Campaigns at Londontown, Inc.
- Director Of Content & Community at Business Class
- Director Of Data Science at S&P Global
- Senior Data Scientist at Real Estate From Anywhere
- Senior Revenue Operations Manager at Akeneo
- Social Media Editor & Content Creator (Contract) at Begin
- Sr. Data Scientist at Visionaire Partners
What I’m Reading: Your Stuff
Let’s look at the most interesting content from around the web on topics you care about, some of which you might have even written.
Social Media Marketing
- The Silent Review- TikTok’s Latest Trend
- 25 Saved Replies to Save You Time On Social Media via Agorapulse
- How Hire a Social Media Manager That Suits Your Business via Agorapulse
Media and Content
- The PESO Model: A 2024 Comprehensive Guide
- Who Sends Traffic on the Web and How Much? New Research from Datos & SparkToro – SparkToro
- 10 Tips for Better PR Pitching Results as Media Layoffs Continue
SEO, Google, and Paid Media
- Google May Show Your Social Media Posts In Search
- Google Confirms: High-Quality Content Is Crawled More Often
- Google to Filter Out AI-Generated Spam in New Update
Advertisement: Business Cameos
If you’re familiar with the Cameo system – where people hire well-known folks for short video clips – then you’ll totally get Thinkers One. Created by my friend Mitch Joel, Thinkers One lets you connect with the biggest thinkers for short videos on topics you care about. I’ve got a whole slew of Thinkers One Cameo-style topics for video clips you can use at internal company meetings, events, or even just for yourself. Want me to tell your boss that you need to be paying attention to generative AI right now?
📺 Pop on by my Thinkers One page today and grab a video now.
Tools, Machine Learning, and AI
- Regulators Need AI Expertise. They Can’t Afford It via WIRED
- The Art of Prompting AI for the ELA Classroom via Teacher Tech with Alice Keeler
- Malware worm targets AI models to steal data and spam users
Analytics, Stats, and Data Science
- LinkedIn open sources lakehouse tool OpenHouse via InfoWorld
- Essential Data Science Terms Every Analyst Should Know
- Revealing Average Screen Time Statistics for 2024
All Things IBM
- No silver bullet: Closing the gender gap in the era of generative AI via IBM Blog
- Maximizing business outcomes and scaling AI adoption with a Hybrid by design approach via IBM Blog
- Renewable energy trends and developments powering a cleaner future via IBM Blog
Dealer’s Choice : Random Stuff
- Getting started with Serviio Media Server
- OpenAI’s NEW “AGI Robot” STUNS The ENITRE INDUSTRY (Figure 01 Breakthrough) – YouTube
- 10 Key Inventions During the Industrial Revolution | History Hit
How to Stay in Touch
Let’s make sure we’re connected in the places it suits you best. Here’s where you can find different content:
- My blog – daily videos, blog posts, and podcast episodes
- My YouTube channel – daily videos, conference talks, and all things video
- My company, Trust Insights – marketing analytics help
- My podcast, Marketing over Coffee – weekly episodes of what’s worth noting in marketing
- My second podcast, In-Ear Insights – the Trust Insights weekly podcast focused on data and analytics
- On Threads – random personal stuff and chaos
- On LinkedIn – daily videos and news
- On Instagram – personal photos and travels
- My free Slack discussion forum, Analytics for Marketers – open conversations about marketing and analytics
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Events I’ll Be At
Here’s where I’m speaking and attending. Say hi if you’re at an event also:
- Society for Marketing Professional Services, Boston, April 2024
- Lab Products Association, Nashville, April 2024
- Society for Marketing Professional Services, Los Angeles, May 2024
- Australian Food and Grocery Council, Melbourne, May 2024
- MAICON, Cleveland, September 2024
- MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, October 2024
Events marked with a physical location may become virtual if conditions and safety warrant it.
If you’re an event organizer, let me help your event shine. Visit my speaking page for more details.
Can’t be at an event? Stop by my private Slack group instead, Analytics for Marketers.
Required Disclosures
Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.
Advertisements in this newsletter have paid to be promoted, and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.
My company, Trust Insights, maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Cisco Systems, Amazon, Talkwalker, MarketingProfs, MarketMuse, Agorapulse, Hubspot, Informa, Demandbase, The Marketing AI Institute, and others. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which Trust Insights may receive indirect financial benefit, and thus I may receive indirect financial benefit from them as well.
Thank You
Thanks for subscribing and reading this far. I appreciate it. As always, thank you for your support, your attention, and your kindness.
See you next week,
Christopher S. Penn
You might also enjoy:
- Almost Timely News, January 14, 2024: The Future of Generative AI is Open
- Almost Timely News, January 7, 2024: Should You Buy a Custom GPT?
- Almost Timely News: Recipes vs. Principles in Generative AI (2024-03-03)
- You Ask, I Answer: Retrieval Augmented Generation vs Fine-Tuning?
- Mind Readings: You Need Passwords for Life in the Age of Generative AI Fraud
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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