Aman Sanger
speaker
350 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Aman Sanger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Like math is a great domain because especially like formal theorem proving because you get this fantastic signal of actually verifying if the thing was correct. And so this means something like RL can work really, really well. And I think like you could have systems that are perhaps very superhuman in math and still not technically have AGI.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is a space that is quite interesting, perhaps quite unique, where if you look at previous tech waves, maybe there's kind of one major thing that happened and it unlocked a new wave of companies.
But every single year, every single model capability or jump you get in model capabilities, you now unlock this new wave of features, things that are possible, especially in programming. And so I think in AI programming, being even just a few months ahead, let alone a year ahead, makes your product much, much, much more useful.
I think the cursor a year from now will need to make the cursor of today look obsolete. And I think, you know, Microsoft has done a number of like fantastic things, but I don't think they're in a great place to really keep innovating and pushing on this in the way that a startup can. Just rapidly implementing features.
And kind of doing the research experimentation necessary to really push the ceiling.
Often the same person even.
There's this interesting thing where if you look at language model loss on different domains, I believe the bits per byte, which is kind of character normalized loss for code is lower than language, which means in general, there are a lot of tokens in code that are super predictable, a lot of characters that are super predictable.
And this is, I think, even magnified when you're not just trying to autocomplete code, but predicting what the user is going to do next in their editing of existing code. And so, you know, the goal of cursor taps, let's eliminate all the low entropy actions you take inside of the editor. When the intent is effectively determined, let's just jump you forward in time, skip you forward.
Yeah. I think I can speak to a few of the details on how to make these things work. They're incredibly low latency, so you need to train small models on this task. In particular... they're incredibly pre-filled token hungry. What that means is they have these really, really long prompts where they see a lot of your code and they're not actually generating that many tokens.
And so the perfect fit for that is using a sparse model, meaning an MOE model. Um, so that was kind of one, one breakthrough, one breakthrough we made that substantially improved performance at longer context. The other being, um, a variant of speculative decoding that we kind of built out called speculative edits.
These are two, I think, important pieces of what make it quite high quality and very fast.
Caching plays a huge role. Because you're dealing with this many input tokens, if every single keystroke that you're typing in a given line, you had to rerun the model on all of those tokens passed in, you're just going to, one, significantly degrade latency, two, you're going to kill your GPUs with load. So you need to design the actual prompts used for the model such that they're caching aware.
And then, yeah, you need to reuse the KV cache across requests just so that you're spending less work, less compute.
This is what we're talking about.
And there's a chance this is also not the final version of it.
Yeah, I mean, so GitHub tries to solve this, right, with code review. When you're doing code review, you're reviewing multiple diffs across multiple files. But like Arvid said earlier, I think you can do much better than code review. You know, code review kind of sucks. Like, you spend a lot of time trying to grok this code that's often quite unfamiliar to you, and...
it often doesn't even actually catch that many bugs. And I think you can significantly improve that review experience using language models, for example, using the kinds of tricks that Arvind had described of maybe pointing you towards the regions that actually matter.
I think also if the code is produced by these language models and it's not produced by someone else, like the code review experience is designed for both the reviewer and the person that produced the code. In the case where the person that produced the code is the language model, You don't have to care that much about their experience.
And you can design the entire thing around the reviewers such that the reviewer's job is as fun, as easy, as productive as possible. And I think that feels like the issue with just kind of naively trying to make these things look like code review. I think you can be a lot more creative and push the boundary on what's possible.
Well, Cursor really works via this ensemble of custom models that we've trained alongside the frontier models that are fantastic at the reasoning intense things. And so CursorTab, for example, is a great example of where you can specialize this model to be even better than even frontier models if you look at evals on the task we set it at.
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