Comment by fatso784 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatso784 | Hacker News Reader

I like the support for Vector DBs and LLaMa-2. I'm curious as to whether and what influences compelled PromptTools, and how it differs from other tools in this space. For context, we've also released a prompt engineering IDE, ChainForge, which is open-source and has many of the features here, such as querying multiple models at once, prompt templating, evaluating responses with Python/JS code and LLM scorers, plotting responses, etc (https://github.com/ianarawjo/ChainForge and a playground at http://chainforge.ai).

One big problem we're seeing in this space is over-trust in LLM scorers as 'evaluators'. I've personally seen that minor tweaks to a scoring prompt can sometimes result in vastly different evaluation 'results.' Given recent debacles (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36370685), I'm wondering how we can design LLMOps tools for evaluation which both support the use of LLMs as scorers, but also caution users about their results. Are you thinking similarly about this question, or seen usability testing which points to over-trust in 'auto-evaluators' as an emerging problem?

Great question, chainforge looks interesting!

We offer auto-evals as one tool in the toolbox. We also consider structured output validations, semantic similarity to an expected result, and manual feedback gathering. If anything, I've seen that people are more skeptical of LLM auto-eval because of the inherent circularity, rather than over-trusting it.

Do you have any suggestions for other evaluation methods we should add? We just got started in July and we're eager to incorporate feedback and keep building.

Thanks for the clarification! Yes, I see now that auto-evals here is more AI agent-ish, than a one-shot approach. Still has the trust issue.

For suggestions, one thing I'm curious about is how we can have out-of-the-box benchmark datasets and do this responsibly. ChainForge supports most OpenAI evals, but from adding this we realized the quality of OpenAI Evals is really _sketchy_... duplicate data, questionable metrics, etc. OpenAI has shown that trusting the community to make benchmarks is perhaps not a good idea; we should instead make it easier for scientists/engineers to upload their benchmarks and make it easier for others to run them. That's one thought, anyway.

One approach we've been working on is having multiple LLMs score each other. Here is the design with an example of how that works: https://github.com/HashemAlsaket/prompttools/pull/1

In short: Pick top 50% responses, LLMs score each other, repeat until top response remains

What does 'top 50%' responses mean here, though? You'd need to have a ground truth of how 'good' each score was to calculate that --and if you had ground truth, no need to use an LLM evaluator to begin with.

If you mean trusting the LLM scores to pick the 50% 'top' responses they grade, this doesn't get around the issue of overly trusting the LLM's scores.

For now, the design is basic:

User to LLM: "Rate this response to the following prompt on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is a poor response and 10 is a great response: [response]"

LLM rates responses of all other LLMs

All other LLMs do the same

Then we take the average score of each response. The LLMs that produced the top 50% of responses will respond again until one response with the highest score remains.

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