World's Fair 2024
The Future of Knowledge Assistants: Jerry Liu
Overview
This talk explores the evolution of knowledge assistants, moving beyond basic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to sophisticated single-agent and multi-agent systems. The core thesis is that building production-grade knowledge assistants requires advancements in data processing, agentic query flows, and multi-agent orchestration to handle complex tasks and interactions effectively.
Who should watch
- AI engineers and builders looking to create advanced knowledge assistants.
- Product Managers and engineers focused on shipping AI-powered features.
- Developers interested in agentic workflows, tool use, and multi-agent systems.
- Those facing challenges with data quality, query understanding, and state management in LLM applications.
Key takeaways
- Basic RAG systems are insufficient for production; advancements in data processing, query understanding, and tool use are crucial.
- High-quality data parsing is fundamental, with specialized parsers improving performance and reducing hallucinations compared to generic methods.
- Single-agent flows can be enhanced by layering agentic components like function calling, query planning, and memory for more sophisticated query understanding.
- Agents are most effective when specialized; a single agent struggles with a vast number of tools, suggesting a multi-agent approach.
- Multi-agent systems offer benefits like specialization, parallelization, and potential cost/latency savings by distributing tasks among focused agents.
- A new approach represents agents as microservices, enabling scalable, deployable, and reusable components that communicate via a central API and message queue.
- This microservice architecture allows for both explicit and implicit orchestration of agents to solve complex tasks.
- The future of knowledge assistants lies in multi-agent orchestration, moving agents out of notebooks and into production-ready service architectures.
Notable quotes
*Garbage in garbage out if you're an ml engineer you've heard that statement many times.*
*Rag was just the beginning.*
*Specialist agents tend to do better.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.