Show HN: Natural language Twitter search using Codex We built a structured search engine for Twitter called Bird SQL, available at https://ift.tt/zZsLdoU . Our search interface uses OpenAI Codex to translate natural language to SQL. Our backend then verifies the SQL, executes it, and displays the results on the web app. This makes large structured datasets like a scrape of Twitter easy for anyone to explore. As background, while working on text-to-SQL as a general problem, we came to believe one of its most powerful applications is as a search tool because: - SQL is hard to write by hand and prone to errors - It allows you to iterate quickly if you’re exploring a new dataset - A lot of contextual information that you’d normally have to internalize (e.g. your data’s schema) can be automatically generated and offloaded to the language model Using large language models (LLMs) like Codex to write the SQL for you means you don’t have to worry about the nitty gritty language details, but still benefit from the power of a language like SQL. Also, after seeing the results of the query, you can inspect (and if necessary, change) the SQL. The lack of this sort of explainability of the query result is one of the more notorious challenges of returning the output of an LLM directly to the user. Additionally, using LLMs in this way makes these kinds of queries over structured data accessible to people who know little or no SQL. While Bird SQL shares significant infrastructure with our more general LLM-powered search engine over unstructured data (Ask Perplexity - https://perplexity.ai[1] ), the two approaches and their respective challenges are quite different. For example, the type of models are different (GPT3.5 vs Codex), obviously the model prompts have different structure, and how to verify model output when its text vs when its code is different. We are currently exploring ways to combine the two approaches, such as using the results of retrieving information from a structured source (as in Bird SQL) as one of the inputs for the LLM to interpret or summarize (as in Ask Perplexity). We would love to hear your questions, suggestions, and feedback! [1] https://ift.tt/dpzN7Z5 https://ift.tt/fgkWEDO December 16, 2022 at 04:12AM
Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...
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