release notes 02.15.24 & memory blog post

content/_index.md

@@ -14,9 +14,10 @@ It’s our mission to realize this future.
 
 ## Blog
 
+[[Memories for All]]
 [[Honcho; User Context Management for LLM Apps|Honcho: User Context Management for LLM Apps]]  
-[[Theory-of-Mind Is All You Need]]  
-[[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT]]
+[[Theory of Mind Is All You Need]]  
+[[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT]]
 
 ## Research
 
@@ -36,6 +37,7 @@ It’s our mission to realize this future.
 
 ## Release Notes 
 
+[[Release Notes 02.15.24]]
 [[Release Notes 02.08.24]]  
 [[Release Notes 02.01.24]]  
 

content/blog/Honcho; User Context Management for LLM Apps.md

@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ So we set out to build a non-skeuomorphic, AI-native tutor that put users first.
 ![[teacher_shoggoth.png]]
 *We're not so different after all ([@anthrupad](https://twitter.com/anthrupad)).*
 
-Our [[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT|experimental tutor]], Bloom, [[Theory-of-Mind Is All You Need|was remarkably effective]]--for thousands of users during the 9 months we hosted it for free--precisely because we built [cognitive architectures](https://blog.langchain.dev/openais-bet-on-a-cognitive-architecture/) that mimic the theory-of-mind expertise of highly efficacious 1:1 instructors.
+Our [[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT|experimental tutor]], Bloom, [[Theory of Mind Is All You Need|was remarkably effective]]--for thousands of users during the 9 months we hosted it for free--precisely because we built [cognitive architectures](https://blog.langchain.dev/openais-bet-on-a-cognitive-architecture/) that mimic the theory-of-mind expertise of highly efficacious 1:1 instructors.
 
 ## Context Failure Mode
 

content/blog/Memories for All.md

@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+## TL;DR
+
+Personalization is the next frontier. OpenAI gets it:
+
+<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We’re testing ChatGPT&#39;s ability to remember things you discuss to make future chats more helpful. <br><br>This feature is being rolled out to a small portion of Free and Plus users, and it&#39;s easy to turn on or off. <a href="https://t.co/1Tv355oa7V">https://t.co/1Tv355oa7V</a> <a href="https://t.co/BsFinBSTbs">pic.twitter.com/BsFinBSTbs</a></p>&mdash; OpenAI (@OpenAI) <a href="https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1757469997742666052?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 13, 2024</a></blockquote>
+
+Super exciting.
+
+But what about the rest of us?
+
+Welp, we built an open source reimplementation of OpenAI's 'memory' features using [Honcho](https://honcho.dev) to effortlessly organize sessions on a per-user basis 
+
+You can derive facts about users, store them, and retrieve for later use. And we're shipping a demo of this implemented with the useful abstractions LangChain provides.
+
+The user context rabbithole goes deep, this is still just the start.
+
+If you're building with or adjacent to Honcho, [join our Discord](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs), we'd love to help 🫡.
+
+## OpenAI Memories
+
+This week [OpenAI announced](https://openai.com/blog/memory-and-new-controls-for-chatgpt) they're testing memory in ChatGPT. Specifically this means learning about individual users in order to improve their experiences.
+
+It's a limited initial rollout, closed under the hood, and rudimentary, but appears to include functionality for deriving facts about users from conversation history and storing those to augment later generation.
+
+There are features for users to view derived facts (memories), prune them, or turn off the features altogether. User memories are apparently also coming to GPTs.
+
+They're betting, we believe correctly, that the real potential here is a wealth of agents whose behavior is in *high-fidelity with user identity*.
+
+We're pumped to see experiments like this taking place. But what if you're a developer that doesn't want to subscribe to this kind of platform dependency and all its attendant externalities? What if you're a user who wants independent or open source apps with a more mature version of these UX benefits?
+
+## Context is Critical
+
+At [Plastic Labs](https://plasticlabs.ai) our mission is to enable rich user memory in and across every application. Only then will we really understand just how augmentative and transformative these agents can be. We've been laser focused on this problem.
+
+![[laser_eyes_user_soapbox.png]]
+
+Right now, the vast majority of software UX is a 1-to-many experience. What you get as a user is, for the most part, the same as everyone else. Mass production unlocked the remarkable ability to produce the exact same goods for every consumer, then software went further allowing a good to be produced once and consumed with consistent experience millions or billions of times.
+
+AI apps can deal *generatively* with each user on an individual basis, that is, an experience can be produced ad hoc for every user upon every interaction. From 1:many to 1:1 without prohibitive sacrifices in efficiency. But we're still underestimating the full scope of possibility here.
+
+As it stands today the space is mostly focused on the (albeit generative) [[The machine learning industry is too focused on general task performance|1:many tasks LLMs can perform]]. The apps remain more or less stateless with regard to the user. To reach 1:1 nirvana, we need more [[Honcho; User Context Management for LLM Apps|user-centric agent design]]. We need frameworks, mechanisms, services, models dedicated to deep coherence with user identity.
+
+Every agent interaction can be generated just in time for every person, informed by relevant personal context more substantive than human-to-human sessions. User context will enable disposable agents on the fly across verticals for lower marginal cost than 1:many software paradigms.
+
+<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tTE3xiHw4Js?si=uzUzcSHFfZdjFduX" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+*(Here's our co-founder [Vince](https://twitter.com/vintrotweets) talking more about some of those possibilities)
+
+## "Open vs Closed"
+
+We subscribe heavily to the spirt of arguments Harrison Chase made in ["OpenAI's Bet on Cognitive Architecture"](https://blog.langchain.dev/openais-bet-on-a-cognitive-architecture/) just a few months ago: 
+
+> There’s a great quote from Jeff Bezos that says to [only do what makes your beer taste better](https://blog.weaverse.io/make-your-beer-taste-better?ref=blog.langchain.dev). This refers to early industrial revolution, when breweries were also making their own electricity. A breweries ability to make good beer doesn’t really depend on how differentiated their electricity was - so those that outsourced electricity generation and focused more on brewing jumped to an advantage.
+> 
+> Is the same true of cognitive architectures? Does having control over your cognitive architecture really make your beer taste better? At the moment, I would argue strongly the answer is yes, for two reasons. First: it’s very difficult to make complex agents actually function. If your application relies on agents working, and getting agents to work is challenging, then almost by definition if you can do that well you’ll have an advantage over your competition. The second reason is that we often see the value of GenAI applications being really closely tied to the performance of the cognitive architecture. A lot of current companies are selling agents for coding, agents for customer support. In those cases, the cognitive architecture IS the product.
+> 
+> That last reason is also the reason that I find it hard to believe that companies would be willing to lock into a cognitive architecture controlled by a single company. I think this is different form of lock-in than cloud or even LLMs. In those cases, you are using cloud resources and LLMs in order to build or power a particular application. But if a cognitive architecture moves closer and closer to being a full application by itself - you’re unlikely to want to have that locked in.
+
+The same applies to social cognition in LLMs and the key to this is leaning about the user and leveraging that knowledge. If proprietary, vertical-specific cognitive architectures make your beer taste better, then personalizing all that tailors the beer to each and every user. If developers will want to control how their app completes a task, then they'll want control over how it completes a task for each user. And users will want this quality of experience.
+
+We've been saying for while now that major walled gardens and their franchises--e.g. OAI's GPTs, Assistants API, and ChatGPT (+Microsoft?); Meta's social apps; Google's workspace suite; etc--will have myriad ecosystem-native agents all with shared access to your user profile. 
+
+The problem here is twofold: (1) independent apps are left out in the cold wrt user context and personalization capabilities, and (2) users are left with a privacy situation little better under web2 business models (or potentially [way worse](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07298)).
+
+Those profiles are gated and proprietary to each climate controlled garden. Step outside and UX plummets. If the independent and open communities want to compete, they need personal beer-production superpowers.
+
+And user fare little better, presented with yet another set of pre-packaged pseudo-choices about privacy to manage, none of which gives them any real control. More paternalism is not the path to individually aligned agents.
+
+Shouldn't we be able to experiment with all this without platform lock-in, allowing projects to collectively leverage user data for positive sum experiences? Shouldn't users own their AI modeled profiles and be able to carry them between independent agents who respect their policies?
+
+Developers will want control over personalization for their application without all the redundant overhead. Users will want a say in how they're being reasoned about and why.
+
+This is our vision for Honcho.
+
+## Intellectual Respect
+
+<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">llms are remarkable empaths<br><br>if you’d read that much fiction, you would be too</p>&mdash; Courtland Leer (@courtlandleer) <a href="https://twitter.com/courtlandleer/status/1753480140850626759?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 2, 2024</a></blockquote>
+
+Today we're releasing a naive adaptation of [research we published late last year](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06983).
+
+There's a ton we plan to unpack and implement there, but the key insight we're highlighting today is affording LLMs the freedom and autonomy to decide what's important.
+
+<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PbuzqCdY0hg?si=9Ylj3XfY5TF_Jrr3" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>
+*(If you want to go deeper into the research, [this webinar we did with LangChain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbuzqCdY0hg&list=PLuFHBYNxPuzrkVP88FxYH1k7ZL5s7WTC8) is a great place to start, as is [the "Violation of Expectations" chain they implemented](https://js.langchain.com/docs/use_cases/agent_simulations/violation_of_expectations_chain))*
+
+This release allows you to experiment with all these ideas. We feed messages into an inference asking the model to derive facts about the user, we store those insights for later use, then we ask the model to retrieve this context to augment some later generation.
+
+Check out the [LangChain implementation](https://docs.honcho.dev/how-to/personal-memory/simple-user-memory) and [Discord bot demo](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs).
+
+Where things get powerful is in the aggregate. What tends to resolve is a highly insightful picture of who your users are and what they need--key context to personalize their experiences. 
+
+N.b. you can certainly direct the model with as much verbosity as you like, but we've found during extensive experimentation that [[Theory of Mind Is All You Need|the more you trust the model]] the better and more useful the results.
+
+This isn't surprising when you consider how much content about what people are thinking is contained in a model's pretraining. It's led to some really exciting [emergent abilities](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083).
+
+Give the model some trust and respect, and you'll be rewarded.
+
+## Let's Build
+
+If you're experimenting with personalization, building with [Honcho](https://github.com/plastic-labs/honcho), or just interested in these ideas, [join our Discord](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs), and let's jam on what we can build together.
+
+A healthy open ecosystem will include lots of projects trying lots of new ways to synthesize and leverage user context.  We're here to support them all 🥽.
+

content/blog/Theory-of-Mind Is All You Need.md → content/blog/Theory of Mind Is All You Need.md

@@ -28,17 +28,17 @@ The key here is they don’t have all the information—they _don’t know_ what
 
 Well we know that (1) foundation models are [shockingly good](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11490) at [theory of mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind), (2) Bloom already excels at [pedagogical reasoning](https://twitter.com/courtlandleer/status/1664673210007449605?s=20), and (3) [autonomous agents](https://twitter.com/yoheinakajima/status/1642881722495954945?s=20) are [having early success](https://twitter.com/Auto_GPT/status/1649370049688354816?s=20), so what if we stopped trying to deterministically prescribe an indeterminant intelligence?
 
-What if we treated Bloom with some intellectual respect?
+What if we treated Bloom with some intellectual respect? ^67d75d
 
 ## Autonomous Prompting
 
 The solution here is scary simple. The results are scary good.
 
-[[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^285105|Here’s a description]] of the previous version’s architecture:
+[[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^285105|Here’s a description]] of the previous version’s architecture:
 
-![[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^285105]]
-![[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^1e01f2]]
-![[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^b1794d]]
+![[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^285105]]
+![[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^1e01f2]]
+![[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT#^b1794d]]
 
 Instead, we’ve now repurposed the ***thought*** chain to do two things:
 

content/extrusions/Extrusion 01.24.md

@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ No one needs another newsletter, so we'll work to make these worthwhile. Expect
 
 Last year was wild. We started as an edtech company and ended as anything but. There's a deep dive on some of the conceptual lore in last week's "[[Honcho; User Context Management for LLM Apps#^09f185|Honcho: User Context Management for LLM Apps]]:"
 
->[Plastic Labs](https://plasticlabs.ai) was conceived as a research group exploring the intersection of education and emerging technology...with the advent of ChatGPT...we shifted our focus to large language models...we set out to build a non-skeuomorphic, AI-native tutor that put users first...our [[Open-Sourcing Tutor-GPT|experimental tutor]], Bloom, [[Theory-of-Mind Is All You Need|was remarkably effective]]--for thousands of users during the 9 months we hosted it for free...
+>[Plastic Labs](https://plasticlabs.ai) was conceived as a research group exploring the intersection of education and emerging technology...with the advent of ChatGPT...we shifted our focus to large language models...we set out to build a non-skeuomorphic, AI-native tutor that put users first...our [[Open Sourcing Tutor-GPT|experimental tutor]], Bloom, [[Theory of Mind Is All You Need|was remarkably effective]]--for thousands of users during the 9 months we hosted it for free...
 
 Building a production-grade, user-centric AI application, then giving it nascent [theory of mind](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11490.pdf) and [[Metacognition in LLMs is inference about inference|metacognition]], made it glaringly obvious to us that social cognition in LLMs was both under-explored and under-leveraged.
 

content/notes/The machine learning industry is too focused on general task performance.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-The machine learning industry has traditionally adopted an academic approach, focusing primarily on performance across a range of tasks. LLMs like GPT-4 are a testament to this, having been scaled up to demonstrate impressive & diverse task capability. This scaling has also led to [[Theory-of-Mind Is All You Need|emergent abilities]], debates about the true nature of which rage on.
+The machine learning industry has traditionally adopted an academic approach, focusing primarily on performance across a range of tasks. LLMs like GPT-4 are a testament to this, having been scaled up to demonstrate impressive & diverse task capability. This scaling has also led to [[Theory of Mind Is All You Need|emergent abilities]], debates about the true nature of which rage on.
 
 However, general capability doesn't necessarily translate to completing tasks as an individual user would prefer. This is a failure mode that anyone building agents will inevitably encounter. The focus, therefore, needs to shift from how language models perform tasks in a general sense to how they perform tasks on a user-specific basis.
 

content/releases/Release Notes 02.01.24.md

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ We talked to a ton of agent developers beginning to build with Honcho over the p
 
 [We'd love to hear what you're building](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs).  
 
-## Announcements
+## News
 
 - [Honcho website](https://honcho.dev) drop!  
 

content/releases/Release Notes 02.15.24.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+Today we've got Honcho v0.0.3, vectorDBs, open source OAI memory, demos, and a blog post.
+
+If you're building with or adjacent to [Honcho](https://honcho.dev), [join our Discord](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs), and let's jam on what we can build together 🤝.  
+
+## News
+- VectorDB support for global, session-spanning user information!
+
+- An open source reimplementation of OpenAI's 'memory' features:
+
+	- Uses Honcho to effortlessly organize sessions on a per-user basis
+
+	- Derives facts about users, stores them, and retrieves for later use
+
+	- [Implementation with the useful abstractions LangChain provides](https://docs.honcho.dev/how-to/personal-memory/simple-user-memory)
+	  
+	- [Discord Bot demo](https://discord.gg/plasticlabs)!
+
+	- [[Memories for All|Blog post on the why]]
+
+## Honcho v0.0.3
+ADDED
+- Collections table to reference a collection of embedding documents
+
+- Documents table to hold vector embeddings for RAG workflows
+
+- Local scripts for running a postgres database with pgvector installed
+
+- OpenAI Dependency for embedding models
+
+- PGvector dependency for vectorDB support
+
+CHANGED
+- `session_data` is now `metadata`
+
+- `session_data` is a JSON field, used python `dict` for compatibility