World's Fair 2025
How to look at your data — Jeff Huber (Chroma) + Jason Liu (567)
Overview
This talk emphasizes the critical importance of measuring and analyzing both the inputs and outputs of AI systems to drive systematic improvement. The core thesis is that effective measurement, akin to Peter Drucker's adage, is essential for making informed decisions and enabling continuous enhancement. By looking at data, practitioners can move beyond guesswork and build more robust and user-centric AI products.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers
- Product Managers
- Builders of AI applications
- Anyone seeking to improve retrieval systems
- Those looking to understand user behavior in AI products
Key takeaways
- Systematic improvement in AI systems is best achieved through rigorous measurement of both inputs and outputs.
- For retrieval systems, fast, inexpensive evals using query-document pairs are more effective than public benchmarks or LLM judges.
- Real-world data and queries are often messy; synthetic data generation should aim to align with real-world query specificity.
- Analyzing conversation outputs allows for segmentation of user behavior, identification of patterns, and data-driven product decisions.
- Tools like Chroma and libraries for summarization and clustering can help extract structured insights from conversation data.
- Pricing AI services based on value or work done, rather than just tokens used, is a potential area for innovation.
- Focusing on improving retrieval accuracy is foundational, as LLM improvements alone cannot compensate for poor retrieval.
- Understanding user interactions through data analysis helps in deciding which tools to build, features to prioritize, and areas to ignore.
Notable quotes
*You can really only manage what you measure.*
*The goal is to say look at your data I think at least 15 times this presentation.*
*The north star of like success rate of how many documents that I get for my queries. Super fast and super useful and makes your improvement of your system much more systematic and deterministic.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.