Episode Details

Catch us at Modular’s ModCon next week with Chris Lattner, and join our community!

2024 note: Hex is now hiring AI Engineers.

Due to Bryan’s very wide ranging experience in data science and AI across Blue Bottle (!), StitchFix, Weights & Biases, and now Hex Magic, this episode can be considered a two-parter.

Notebooks = Chat++

We’ve talked a lot about AI UX (in our meetups, writeups, and guest posts), and today we’re excited to dive into a new old player in AI interfaces: notebooks!

Depending on your background, you either Don’t Like or you Like notebooks — they are the most popular example of Knuth’s Literate Programming concept, basically a collection of cells; each cell can execute code, display it, and share its state with all the other cells in a notebook. They can also simply be Markdown cells to add commentary to the analysis.

Notebooks have a long history but most recently became popular from iPython evolving into Project Jupyter, and a wave of notebook based startups from Observable to DeepNote and Databricks sprung up for the modern data stack.

The first wave of AI applications has been very chat focused (ChatGPT, Character.ai, Perplexity, etc). Chat as a user interface has a few shortcomings, the major one being the inability to edit previous messages. We enjoyed Bryan’s takes on why notebooks feel like “Chat++” and how they are building Hex Magic:

* Atomic actions vs Stream of consciousness: in a chat interface, you make corrections by adding more messages to a conversation (i.e. “Can you try again by doing X instead?” or “I actually meant XYZ”). The context can easily get messy and confusing for models (and humans!) to follow. Notebooks’ cell structure on the other hand allows users to go back to any previous cells and make edits without having to add new ones at the bottom.

* “Airlocks” for repeatability: one of the ideas they came up with at Hex is “airlocks”, a collection of cells that depend on each other and keep each other in sync. If you have a task like “Create a summary of my customers’ recent purchases”, there are many sub-tasks to be done (look up the data, sum the amounts, write the text, etc). Each sub-task will be in its own cell, and the airlock will keep them all in sync together.

* Technical + Non-Technical users: previously you had to use Python / R / Julia to write notebooks code, but with models like GPT-4, natural language is usually enough. Hex is also working on lowering the barrier of entry for non-technical users into notebooks, similar to how Code Interpreter is doing the same in ChatGPT.

Obviously notebooks aren’t new for developers (OpenAI Cookbooks are a good example), but haven’t had much adoption in less