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Artificial Intelligence

How to Evaluate a RAG System Without Fooling Yourself

Measuring RAG quality rigorously takes more than skimming a handful of answers: it requires objective metrics (faithfulness, relevance, context precision, and coverage), a golden set of hundreds of curated questions, and regular human validation of the LLM judge to avoid misleading conclusions.

Artificial Intelligence

llama.cpp: Optimisations That Keep Surprising

llama.cpp is the C++ library that powers Ollama and much of the local-LLM ecosystem. 2024 added speculative decoding with two- to three-fold speedups, an RPC server for sharding layers across machines, and a stable GGUF format. Ollama covers 90% of cases; going direct pays off with uncommon hardware or specific flags.

Artificial Intelligence

Ollama in 2024: Running LLMs Locally Without Pain

Ollama became the standard for running large language models locally in 2024. It wraps llama.cpp in a single binary with Docker-style CLI and an OpenAI-compatible API. Phi-3 Mini runs in 4 GB; Llama 3.1 8B Q4 needs 6 GB. For production traffic at scale, vLLM remains the correct choice.

Artificial Intelligence

Product-Market Fit in the AI Era: What Changes

Product-market fit for LLM-powered products still depends on the same classic signals: cohort retention, NPS, and revenue expansion. What changes are the higher quality baseline, faster competitor iteration, and where durable moats come from: proprietary data, workflow integration, and network effects.

Artificial Intelligence

Claude’s Computer Use: When the Agent Moves the Mouse

Computer Use is the Claude API feature, launched by Anthropic on 22 October 2024, that lets the model view screenshots and move the mouse, type, and click inside a loop your own system executes and controls. It works well on apps without an API and fails on CAPTCHAs, highly dynamic interfaces, and long tasks.

Artificial Intelligence

GitHub Copilot Workspace: GitHub’s Conversational IDE

GitHub Copilot Workspace, in technical preview since April 2024, proposes task-oriented development: describe the problem in a GitHub issue and the AI reads the codebase, generates an editable multi-file plan, and implements it. It competes with Cursor Composer, though with more latency; its edge is native integration with PRs, issues, and GitHub history.

Architecture

vLLM: Serving LLMs in Production with Very High Throughput

vLLM serves language models on GPU using PagedAttention and continuous batching, two techniques that multiply throughput compared with a naive server. It exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so migrating an existing application only requires changing the base URL and deploying the right binary.

Artificial Intelligence

How to Install Ollama on macOS with Apple Silicon

Installing Ollama on an Apple Silicon Mac is as simple as running one Homebrew command. Then pick a model based on available RAM (Phi-3 for 8 GB, Llama 3.1 8B for 16 GB) and expose the local, OpenAI-compatible HTTP API on port 11434 to plug it into your own applications.

Artificial Intelligence

SGLang: Fine Control Over LLM Execution

SGLang adds a Python DSL for controlling LLM generation with constrained decoding, parallel branching, and RadixAttention, the structure that indexes the KV cache as a radix trie to reuse shared prefixes across requests. When that pattern exists, speedups over vLLM reach up to 5 times; without it, the advantage shrinks.

Artificial Intelligence

Llama 3: Meta’s New Open Standard

Llama 3 is the open-model family Meta released on April 18, 2024, in 8-billion and 70-billion-parameter sizes, trained on 15 trillion tokens. The 70B beat Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5 in Meta's own human evaluation, and its licence allows free commercial use up to 700 million monthly active users.

Artificial Intelligence

nomic-embed-text: Competitive Open Embeddings

nomic-embed-text-v1.5 from Nomic AI is an embedding model with weights, code and training data released under Apache 2.0: 137 million parameters, up to 8192 tokens of context, and an MTEB score of 62.4, almost matching the 62.3 of OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small, at 768 dimensions instead of 1536.

Artificial Intelligence

Choosing an Open LLM for Enterprise in 2024

Choosing an open LLM for enterprise in 2024 is no longer just Llama 2: Mistral, Mixtral, Qwen, Yi, DeepSeek, and Phi-2 all compete with different licences and sizes. The criteria that actually decide are commercial licence, available hardware, language support, and your own evaluation on real use cases, not just the trendy benchmark.

Architecture

pgvector in 2024: HNSW Indexes and Real Scaling

pgvector matured in 2023-2024 with the HNSW index type and parallel construction that arrived in version 0.6. For projects already running PostgreSQL, a dedicated vector database is not needed in most cases: this guide explains when PostgreSQL is enough, how to configure the index, and where it starts to fall short.

Artificial Intelligence

Cohere Embed v3: Multilingual and Enterprise-Oriented

Cohere Embed v3 is an embedding model that distinguishes queries from documents via the input_type parameter and scores intrinsic text quality, with multilingual support for over 100 languages at 1024 dimensions. It costs $0.10 per million tokens versus OpenAI's $0.02, and delivers better recall in multilingual RAG.

Artificial Intelligence

Hugging Face TGI: Serving Open Models at Scale

Text Generation Inference (TGI) is the Hugging Face stack for serving open LLMs in production: continuous batching, 4-bit and 8-bit quantization, streaming, and an OpenAI-compatible API. After a brief restrictive-licence episode in 2023, it returned to Apache 2.0 in version 2.0.