Self-Expanding Graphs
We are happy to publish the video from Bay Area AI of a talk by Cameron Pfiffer from .txt.
Cameron is a developer advocate at .txt, the startup that does structured output with Outlines. He was a regular at Bay Area AI and he’s a really cool, knowledgeable and funny guy (apparently an alpaca rancher at some point!). After following him for a while I’ve invited Cameron to do a joint meetup with Charles Frye of Modal, our OG By the Bay, and they both really liked the idea! Charles invited Neural Magic to showcase full-stack OSS AI. Then Cameron not only built an amazing project for his talk, but also incorporated all the technologies presented at the meetup, including Neo4j!
Structured output means that an LLM is asked to produce not free-flowing natural language text, as the kind you’re reading right now, but rather generate an output conforming to a schema. Such a schema can be thought of as a class instance in an object-oriented programming language, or a record, or a JSON object. These all contain fields with names and values. The names are strings but the values could be different types, such as floating-point numbers, integers, booleans, strings, or further composite nested objects.
The self-expanding graphs in this talk start with a root directive, which poses a problem to solve, and proceed to query LLM about the ways to solve it. Concepts and questions come back and are added to a knowledge graph, used for subsequent traversal and more queries.
Cameron used Neo4j to construct and visualize the graph, and Modal with vLLM to run inference with Llama. Not only this is a super fun talk, it’s an exemplary OSS AI project that can inspire us to do all kinds of things with AI and knowledge!
Based on all of this, we invited .txt to OAKS, the community collaboratory for Open Agentic AI Knowledge Stack.
See more talks like this at Bay Area AI, the longest-running, deepest technical AI meetup in the world: lu.ma/_ai. Join us in November for the best OSS AI meetups gathering at their 11th yearly conference, AI By the Bay!