TL;DR
- Research: PoC development is in progress. I attended CES'24 to understand the latest market trends.
- Life: I traveled to 🇲🇽Mexico for the New Year's holidays. After the winter break, I reunited with friends and caught up on recent times.
1. Research
1/9-12 CES'24 @🇺🇸LasVegas
1/31 AI User Conference @🇺🇸SanFrancisco
Progress
-
PoC Development:
- Although it's called a PoC, as we've been developing, we've found ourselves needing more and more features, to the point where it's becoming closer to a production environment rather than just an MVP.
- The alpha version has already been deployed to the production domain, but since we're planning some disruptive development, we're keeping it unpublished to avoid issues with user data getting involved.
- At the same time, we're also building a Python SDK toolkit, available on PyPI.
-
Paper Research:
- SpacialVLM (Google): A VLM improved with spatial recognition abilities by training with spatial reasoning data.
- LUMIERE (Google): A spatiotemporal diffusion model for video generation. The demos continue to be impressive.
- DPO (Stanford): Traditional RLHF requires a large amount of human feedback, which is very costly. DPO eliminates the need for reinforcement learning and human evaluations. Instead, it uses a pre-prepared "preference dataset." The mathematical equivalence of RLHF and DPO was also demonstrated.
Future Plan
- PoC: Reschedule for the beta release, and gather feedback from a limited user group.
CES'24
Attended the CES (100th anniversary) event. There were generative AI-related exhibits everywhere, which helped to capture the latest market trends. Being there in person to experience EV, AR, and VR was also great. Korean manufacturers and startups, including Samsung and LG, seemed to stand out the most. There were other notable exhibits as well.
- Rabbit: An OS and AI computer that use natural language as the base interface.
- VolksWagen MercedesBentz: Equipped with a finetuned LLM, it enables interaction with the car to support driving.
- Sony: An EV that can be operated with a PlayStation Controller.
- Samsung: Ballie - Home Assistant Robot
AI User Conference
The Hands-on Workshop was very educational, and I plan to apply what I learned right away. The presenting companies were predominantly SaaS-based, focusing on RAG development for custom chatbots and similar applications. I also gained an understanding of the excitement surrounding LLMOps, evaluation methods, and their importance. Evaluating generative AI is challenging due to its reliance on human subjectivity, unlike traditional classification problems. A basic strategy for structured outputs, like those in JSON format, involves comparing human-generated texts with the AI's reproductions to assess accuracy (match, include, etc.). For "unstructured" outputs, such as those in summarization tasks, various methods are being explored, including using another LLM for evaluation. CI becomes particularly crucial when offering LLM-based services at a product level because systems handling generative AI can behave less predictably than traditional ones. Implementing an Evaluation Pipeline to monitor issues like hallucination, data drift, and offensive output is essential. The workshop also reinforced knowledge and methods for fine-tuning, such as LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) and QLoRA (Quantized LoRA), using transformers. Additionally, concepts like OpenRouter, a unified interface for LLMs, were intriguing.
2. Life
12/31-04 @🇲🇽MexicoCity
12/04-07 @🇲🇽PlayaDelCarmen
01/07-09 @🇲🇽Cancun
01/28 🏈Watching 49ers game @SportsBar,PaloAlto
01/23,30 ESLWinter Vacation
I traveled to 🇲🇽Mexico and found numerous attractions including Maya and Aztec ruins, colonial architecture, street murals, cenotes, Xcaret Park, and Caribbean beaches. Of course, visiting the ruins is a must, but I also recommend the 🚠Mexicable and 🛶Xplor.
🏈Watching 49ers game @SportsBar,PaloAlto
The local team's dramatic comeback victory led to a huge celebration, bringing them just one win away from their first Super Bowl Championship in 30 years. The Super Bowl, the championship game for the NFL's 32 teams, is known not only for the game itself but also for its halftime show and innovative commercial advertisements, making it a cultural phenomenon that transcends sports in the United States.
