Starting with templated responses ensures that no generated text is sent to users, minimizing risks like hallucinations or prompt injections. This approach builds confidence in the system before gradually introducing more dynamic elements.
Word2Vec provided a numerical representation of words, enabling mathematical operations like similarity comparisons. It revolutionized NLP by allowing systems to handle natural language more effectively, serving as a foundational tool for early chatbot development.
Rasa combines the natural language understanding of LLMs with deterministic business logic. The LLM handles the complexity of conversations, while a simple, rule-based system manages tasks and state, ensuring reliability and scalability.
LLMs struggle with maintaining consistent state in transactional tasks, such as reserving and unreserving seats. These tasks require deterministic systems to handle edge cases and ensure state consistency, which LLMs alone cannot reliably manage.
The 'prompt and pray' approach lacks control over LLM outputs and requires trial and error to adjust prompts. It is inefficient and unreliable for enterprise systems, where predictable and accurate responses are critical.
RAG dynamically retrieves relevant information from external sources to augment LLM prompts, improving accuracy and relevance. It addresses the limitations of static prompts by incorporating up-to-date and context-specific data.
Rasa uses templated responses by default, eliminating opportunities for LLMs to generate incorrect outputs. This approach ensures compliance and reliability, especially in regulated industries like banking.
Maintaining state allows conversational AI systems to track user interactions, retrieve relevant information, and handle multi-turn conversations effectively. It ensures continuity and context-awareness in dialogues.
Enterprises start with LLMs for understanding user inputs while using templated responses to minimize risks. As confidence grows, they introduce dynamic elements like paraphrasing and RAG to enhance personalization and naturalness.
Dynamic systems, like LLMs, handle unpredictable and fuzzy aspects of conversations, while deterministic systems manage structured, rule-based tasks. Combining both ensures flexibility for natural language interactions and reliability for business logic execution.
In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and Rasa) cofounder and CEO Alan Nichol discuss the past, present, and future of AI agents and chatbots. Alan shares his history working to solve this problem with traditional natural language processing (NLP), expounds on how large language models (LLMs) are helping to dull the many sharp corners of natural-language interactions, and explains how pairing them with inflexible business logic is a great combination.
Learn more:
Task-Oriented Dialogue with In-Context Learning)
GoEX: Perspectives and Designs Towards a Runtime for Autonomous LLM Application)
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