AI noob question:
Why do OpenAI/Anthropic/... not support constraining token generation? I'd imagine producing valid structured output would be at the top of their feature request lists.
replies(3):
Why do OpenAI/Anthropic/... not support constraining token generation? I'd imagine producing valid structured output would be at the top of their feature request lists.
LLMs today are really good at producing output that satisfies the very vague metric of “this looks good to a human” but aren’t nearly as good at producing output that satisfies a complex set of syntax and schema constraints. The state space of the former is much larger than the latter, so there’s a lot more opportunity for an LLM to be successful by targeting the state space of “looks good to a human”. Plus, there’s still a lot of room for advancement in multimodality and data quality improvements.
Search problems, in general, deal with this too: it’s easy to provide a good search experience when there are a lot of high-quality candidates, and much harder when there are fewer, because all you have to do is return just a few of the best candidates. (This is partly why Google Drive Search has always sucked compared to Web Search- it’s really hard to guess exactly which document in a 10k-file-Drive a user is looking for, as opposed to finding something on Wikipedia/NYTimes/Instagram that the user might be looking for!)