Dr. Patrick Lewis, who coined the term RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and now works at Cohere, discusses the evolution of language models, RAG systems, and challenges in AI evaluation.
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Key topics covered:
- Origins and evolution of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Challenges in evaluating RAG systems and language models
- Human-AI collaboration in research and knowledge work
- Word embeddings and the progression to modern language models
- Dense vs sparse retrieval methods in information retrieval
The discussion also explored broader implications and applications:
- Balancing faithfulness and fluency in RAG systems
- User interface design for AI-augmented research tools
- The journey from chemistry to AI research
- Challenges in enterprise search compared to web search
- The importance of data quality in training AI models
Patrick Lewis: https://www.patricklewis.io/
Cohere Command Models, check them out - they are amazing for RAG!
https://cohere.com/command
TOC
00:00:00 1. Intro to RAG
00:05:30 2. RAG Evaluation: Poll framework & model performance
00:12:55 3. Data Quality: Cleanliness vs scale in AI training
00:15:13 4. Human-AI Collaboration: Research agents & UI design
00:22:57 5. RAG Origins: Open-domain QA to generative models
00:30:18 6. RAG Challenges: Info retrieval, tool use, faithfulness
00:42:01 7. Dense vs Sparse Retrieval: Techniques & trade-offs
00:47:02 8. RAG Applications: Grounding, attribution, hallucination prevention
00:54:04 9. UI for RAG: Human-computer interaction & model optimization
00:59:01 10. Word Embeddings: Word2Vec, GloVe, and semantic spaces
01:06:43 11. Language Model Evolution: BERT, GPT, and beyond
01:11:38 12. AI & Human Cognition: Sequential processing & chain-of-thought
Refs:
1. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) paper / Patrick Lewis et al. [00:27:45]
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401
2. LAMA (LAnguage Model Analysis) probe / Petroni et al. [00:26:35]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01066
3. KILT (Knowledge Intensive Language Tasks) benchmark / Petroni et al. [00:27:05]
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.02252
4. Word2Vec algorithm / Tomas Mikolov et al. [01:00:25]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781
5. GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation) / Pennington et al. [01:04:35]
https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/
6. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) / Devlin et al. [01:08:00]
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
7. 'The Language Game' book / Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen [01:11:40]
https://amzn.to/4grEUpG
Disclaimer: This is the sixth video from our Cohere partnership. We were not told what to say in the interview. Filmed in Seattle in June 2024.
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