Saturday, November 2, 2024

Prompt Engineering, by Mukund Sundararajan

 Do you want to improve your chats with chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs)? (For example, GPT, Gemini, Anthropic/ Claude, Meta...) Here's a chance to learn from Mukund Sundararajan, who knows what those LLMs are good at (and not so good at) and why, and how to think about how to prompt them. His book might have been called How to be a Prompt Engineer.

Thinking Like A Large Language Model: Become an AI manager 
by Mukund Sundararajan
 
"Consider an analogy. You are a manager, you have an employee, and you are trying to get a task done. It helps to understand how the employee thinks, what the employee knows, and how they may behave. What would happen if you made a certain request? How would the employee interpret it? How would they respond? What do our past interactions with the employee tell us about their capabilities? How should we phrase our request so that it is interpreted correctly? Should we break our request into steps? What aspects of their work would we need to verify?

"Now imagine the employee is an AI. It still helps to have answers for the questions above. The goal of this book is to help you arrive at those answers.

"We describe how a Large Language Model (LLM) operates in three different ways: via input-output examples, via an overview of its training process, and via analogies to other familiar concepts.

"You don't have to work with technology to understand this book. It will be accessible to anyone with a high-school education—students, professionals, business-people, executives—anyone who wants to extract value out of LLMs or chatbots.

"Author details: Mukund Sundararajan is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He has spent the past decade analyzing, developing, and deploying AI in products—successfully and unsuccessfully. He has also observed others do so. He currently works on the Gemini series of Large Language Models and writes prompts for a living."

 

 

Friday, November 1, 2024

Lanchester prize to Ashlagi, Kanoria, Leshno, Braverman and Shi (post 2 of 2)

 INFORMS has now announced the details of the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, which went to two teams, one of which worked on matching and market design.

Here is the matching team, with a little more detail than in my previous post*, about the papers that were recognized by the award.

2024 - Winner(s)

2024 Winner(s)

Winning material: Collection of Papers: “Unbalanced random matching markets: The stark effect of competition” and “Clearing matching markets efficiently: informative signals and match recommendations”
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Here's the prize citation (sent to me by Sasa Pekec, the chair of the prize committee):
"The 2024 Lanchester Prize is awarded to Itai Ashlagi, Mark Braverman, Yash Kanoria, Jacob Leshno, and Peng Shi for their papers “Unbalanced random matching markets: The stark effect of competition” and “Clearing matching markets efficiently: Informative signals and match recommendations”.
These papers have advanced the field of market design by providing fundamental insights into the performance of two-sided matching markets. By introducing a novel theoretical approach, they resolve a long-standing empirical puzzle: why the set of stable matchings is small in many practically important matching markets. Moreover, by creatively integrating match recommendations and signaling strategies, they demonstrate how to reduce congestion in these markets. These contributions have profoundly impacted both methodological work and practical applications focused on the conduct and organization of centralized and decentralized markets."

The other members of the prize committee were Francis de VĂ©ricourt, Wedad Elmaghraby, Fatma Kilinç-Karzan, Azarakhsh Malekian, and Mengdi Wang
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Itai shared with me his brief remarks upon accepting the award on behalf of the team at the recent Seattle meeting:
 
"This is a real honor and it is very special to share the prize with my wonderful coauthors Mark Braverman, Yash Kanoria, Jacob Leshno and Peng Shi who could not attend this event today.  It is a great honor and humbling to share this award with  Anatoli Juditsky and Arkadi Nemirovski as well as the distinguished past recipients of the prize. 34 years ago, Alvin Roth and Marilda Sotomayor were awarded the prize for their remarkable and beautiful book on two-sided matching. The last two decades, matching in two-sided markets has been and still is a very active area in Operations Research and economics, with many successful applications and a rich theory. We are grateful to be able to contribute to this area. Thanks to Sasa and the committee. It is a real honor being part of this community."

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*Earlier: Wednesday, October 23, 2024 Lanchester Prize (Post 1 of 2)