19 Comments
Feb 11Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

Thanks for this! Easy to read and follow and I like that it's aimed at a level higher than 101 so more technical folks can get to the meat of the post right away.

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author

Thanks for the feedback! I have many more similar topics in the oven but if there's something concrete you'd like to see let me know.

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

While the coding is above my paygrade, I absolutely appreciate the clean and hands-on nature of this. Very well done. For the code snippets, it looks like you just make screenshots? Guess you're not a fan of Substack's built-in "code block" template?

Also, the speed of your final app is impressive - there's almost no latency at all. Is that due to Mistral's innate response speed? Definitely faster than my experience with GPT-4.

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Thanks man!

The code snippets is my best attempt, definitely not perfect (you can't select the text) but better than Substack native code blocks.

Regarding speed, the indexing part is a bit of cheating because I cache the embeddings so the second time I ran it didn't need to compute them at all, but the conversation part, yes, that is the real speed of querying the Mistral API.

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

Yeah I was mainly referring to the subsequent conversation speed. Very cool!

What's your beef with the code blocks on Substack? I don't have any opinion on the subject, since I never use them at all. Just curious.

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They're terrible. No syntax highlight, word wrapping wherever the hell it wants to, it's basically nothing but a mono space font, and an ugly font for the matter.

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

Yeah makes sense!

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

Alex, have you played with ChatPDF yet?

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author

I've seen more than a few apps on this same line. Which exactly are you talking about?

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

https://www.chatpdf.com/

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Oh yeah looks like it's really full featured. In the bottom they're doing something very similar to what I did here but of course the devil is in the details, and adding a good UX layer on top makes a world of difference.

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

Nice, I was curious as to whether you solved some of the underlying problems a little differently. I don't know any of the specifics under the hood, but I was using ChatPDF for a while there, especially in the earlier days of LLMs.

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I don't think, I haven't done anything especially innovative here, this is the barebones implementation that everyone doing LLMs plus retrieval is using. It can improved a lot!

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Feb 10Liked by Alejandro Piad Morffis

Well, you made this independently and from scratch! That is bad ass. Maybe some of the ideas/features from the existing apps can be used to improve this one, and it can become like best in class... but I also have a feeling the point is to make stuff, not to use stuff (although the utility part is a very nice bonus).

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