Model: dwb2023/legal-ft-2
Author: dwb2023
Pipeline: sentence-similarity
Library: sentence-transformers
Tags: sentence-transformers, safetensors, bert, sentence-similarity, feature-extraction, generated_from_trainer, dataset_size:156, loss:MatryoshkaLoss, loss:MultipleNegativesRankingLoss, arxiv:1908.10084, arxiv:2205.13147, arxiv:1705.00652, base_model:Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l, base_model:finetune:Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l, model-index, text-embeddings-inference, endpoints_compatible, region:us
Base models (finetune): id: Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l
Card metadata: tags: sentence-transformers, sentence-similarity, feature-extraction, generated_from_trainer, dataset_size:156, loss:MatryoshkaLoss, loss:MultipleNegativesRankingLoss
base_model: Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l
widget: source_sentence: Which multi-modal models were released by significant vendors in 2024, and in which months did they appear?
sentences: An interesting point of comparison here could be the way railways rolled out around the world in the 1800s. Constructing these required enormous investments and had a massive environmental impact, and many of the lines that were built turned out to be unnecessary—sometimes multiple lines from different companies serving the exact same routes!
The resulting bubbles contributed to several financial crashes, see Wikipedia for Panic of 1873, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1901 and the UK’s Railway Mania. They left us with a lot of useful infrastructure and a great deal of bankruptcies and environmental damage.
The year of slop, In 2024, almost every significant model vendor released multi-modal models. We saw the Claude 3 series from Anthropic in March, Gemini 1.5 Pro in April (images, audio and video), then September brought Qwen2-VL and Mistral’s Pixtral 12B and Meta’s Llama 3.2 11B and 90B vision models. We got audio input and output from OpenAI in October, then November saw SmolVLM from Hugging Face and December saw image and video models from Amazon Nova.
In October I upgraded my LLM CLI tool to support multi-modal models via attachments. It now has plugins for a whole collection of different vision models., OpenAI made GPT-4o free for all users in May, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet was freely available from its launch in June. This was a momentus change, because for the previous year free users had mostly been restricted to GPT-3.5 level models, meaning new users got a very inaccurate mental model of what a capable LLM could actually do.
That era appears to have ended, likely permanently, with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT Pro. This $200/month subscription service is the only way to access their most capable model, o1 Pro.
Since the trick behind the o1 series (and the future models it will undoubtedly inspire) is to expend more compute time to get better results, I don’t think those days of free access to the best available models are likely to return., source_sentence: How did the construction of railways in the 1800s impact the environment?
sentences: The environmental impact got much, much worse
The much bigger problem here is the enormous competitive buildout of the infrastructure that is imagined to be necessary for these models in the future.
Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are all spending billions of dollars rolling out new datacenters, with a very material impact on the electricity grid and the environment. There’s even talk of spinning up new nuclear power stations, but those can take decades.
Is this infrastructure necessary? DeepSeek v3’s $6m training cost and the continued crash in LLM prices might hint that it’s not. But would you want to be the big tech executive that argued NOT to build out this infrastructure only to be proven wrong in a few years’ time?, An interesting point of comparison here could be the way railways rolled out around the world in the 1800s. Constructing these required enormous investments and had a massive environmental impact, and many of the lines that were built turned out to be unnecessary—sometimes multiple lines from different companies serving the exact same routes!
The resulting bubbles contributed to several financial crashes, see Wikipedia for Panic of 1873, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1901 and the UK’s Railway Mania. They left us with a lot of useful infrastructure and a great deal of bankruptcies and environmental damage.
The year of slop, The boring yet crucial secret behind good system prompts is test-driven development. You don’t write down a system prompt and find ways to test it. You write down tests and find a system prompt that passes them.

It’s become abundantly clear over the course of 2024 that writing good automated evals for LLM-powered systems is the skill that’s most needed to build useful applications on top of these models. If you have a strong eval suite you can adopt new models faster, iterate better and build more reliable and useful product features than your competition.
Vercel’s Malte Ubl:, source_sentence: How is a prompt without evals, models, and UX compared in the given context?
sentences: DeepSeek v3 is a huge 685B parameter model—one of the largest openly licensed models currently available, significantly bigger than the largest of Meta’s Llama series, Llama 3.1 405B.
Benchmarks put it up there with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Vibe benchmarks (aka the Chatbot Arena) currently rank it 7th, just behind the Gemini 2.0 and OpenAI 4o/o1 models. This is by far the highest ranking openly licensed model.
The really impressive thing about DeepSeek v3 is the training cost. The model was trained on 2,788,000 H800 GPU hours at an estimated cost of $5,576,000. Llama 3.1 405B trained 30,840,000 GPU hours—11x that used by DeepSeek v3, for a model that benchmarks slightly worse., When @v0 first came out we were paranoid about protecting the prompt with all kinds of pre and post processing complexity.
We completely pivoted to let it rip. A prompt without the evals, models, and especially UX is like getting a broken ASML machine without a manual, So far, I think they’re a net positive. I’ve used them on a personal level to improve my productivity (and entertain myself) in all sorts of different ways. I think people who learn how to use them effectively can gain a significant boost to their quality of life.
A lot of people are yet to be sold on their value! Some think their negatives outweigh their positives, some think they are all hot air, and some even think they represent an existential threat to humanity.
They’re actually quite easy to build
The most surprising thing we’ve learned about LLMs this year is that they’re actually quite easy to build., source_sentence: Why might achieving AGI be necessary to fully solve the problem of gullibility in AI agents?
sentences: We already knew LLMs were spookily good at writing code. If you prompt them right, it turns out they can build you a full interactive application using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (and tools like React if you wire up some extra supporting build mechanisms)—often in a single prompt.
Anthropic kicked this idea into high gear when they released Claude Artifacts, a groundbreaking new feature that was initially slightly lost in the noise due to being described half way through their announcement of the incredible Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
With Artifacts, Claude can write you an on-demand interactive application and then let you use it directly inside the Claude interface.
Here’s my Extract URLs app, entirely generated by Claude:, I’m still trying to figure out the best patterns for doing this for my own work. Everyone knows that evals are important, but there remains a lack of great guidance for how to best implement them—I’m tracking this under my evals tag. My SVG pelican riding a bicycle benchmark is a pale imitation of what a real eval suite should look like.
Apple Intelligence is bad, Apple’s MLX library is excellent
As a Mac user I’ve been feeling a lot better about my choice of platform this year.
Last year it felt like my lack of a Linux/Windows  machine with an NVIDIA GPU was a huge disadvantage in terms of trying out new models., A lot of people are excited about AI agents—an infuriatingly vague term that seems to be converging on “AI systems that can go away and act on your behalf”. We’ve been talking about them all year, but I’ve seen few if any examples of them running in production, despite lots of exciting prototypes.
I think this is because of gullibility.
Can we solve this? Honestly, I’m beginning to suspect that you can’t fully solve gullibility without achieving AGI. So it may be quite a while before those agent dreams can really start to come true!
Code may be the best application
Over the course of the year, it’s become increasingly clear that writing code is one of the things LLMs are most capable of., source_sentence: How many lines of Python code are generally needed to train a basic version of a powerful system?
sentences: Intuitively, one would expect that systems this powerful would take millions of lines of complex code. Instead, it turns out a few hundred lines of Python is genuinely enough to train a basic version!
What matters most is the training  data. You need a lot of data to make these things work, and the quantity and quality of the training data appears to be the most important factor in how good the resulting model is.
If you can gather the right data, and afford to pay for the GPUs to train it, you can build an LLM., The two main categories I see are people who think AI agents are obviously things that go and act on your behalf—the travel agent model—and people who think in terms of LLMs that have been given access to tools which they can run in a loop as part of solving a problem. The term “autonomy” is often thrown into the mix too, again without including a clear definition.
(I also collected 211 definitions on Twitter a few months ago—here they are in Datasette Lite—and had gemini-exp-1206 attempt to summarize them.)
Whatever the term may mean, agents still have that feeling of perpetually “coming soon”., Law is not ethics. Is it OK to train models on people’s content without their permission, when those models will then be used in ways that compete with those people?
As the quality of results produced by AI models has increased over the year, these questions have become even more pressing.
The impact on human society in terms of these models is already huge, if difficult to objectively measure.
People have certainly lost work to them—anecdotally, I’ve seen this for copywriters, artists and translators.
There are a great deal of untold stories here. I’m hoping 2024 sees significant amounts of dedicated journalism on this topic.
My blog in 2023
Here’s a tag cloud for content I posted to my blog in 2023 (generated using Django SQL Dashboard):
pipeline_tag: sentence-similarity
library_name: sentence-transformers
metrics: cosine_accuracy@1, cosine_accuracy@3, cosine_accuracy@5, cosine_accuracy@10, cosine_precision@1, cosine_precision@3, cosine_precision@5, cosine_precision@10, cosine_recall@1, cosine_recall@3, cosine_recall@5, cosine_recall@10, cosine_ndcg@10, cosine_mrr@10, cosine_map@100
model-index: name: SentenceTransformer based on Snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l
results: task: type: information-retrieval
name: Information Retrieval
dataset: name: Unknown
type: unknown
metrics: type: cosine_accuracy@1
value: 0.9583333333333334
name: Cosine Accuracy@1
verified: no, type: cosine_accuracy@3
value: 1
name: Cosine Accuracy@3
verified: no, type: cosine_accuracy@5
value: 1
name: Cosine Accuracy@5
verified: no, type: cosine_accuracy@10
value: 1
name: Cosine Accuracy@10
verified: no, type: cosine_precision@1
value: 0.9583333333333334
name: Cosine Precision@1
verified: no, type: cosine_precision@3
value: 0.3333333333333333
name: Cosine Precision@3
verified: no, type: cosine_precision@5
value: 0.20000000000000004
name: Cosine Precision@5
verified: no, type: cosine_precision@10
value: 0.10000000000000002
name: Cosine Precision@10
verified: no, type: cosine_recall@1
value: 0.9583333333333334
name: Cosine Recall@1
verified: no, type: cosine_recall@3
value: 1
name: Cosine Recall@3
verified: no, type: cosine_recall@5
value: 1
name: Cosine Recall@5
verified: no, type: cosine_recall@10
value: 1
name: Cosine Recall@10
verified: no, type: cosine_ndcg@10
value: 0.9846220730654774
name: Cosine Ndcg@10
verified: no, type: cosine_mrr@10
value: 0.9791666666666666
name: Cosine Mrr@10
verified: no, type: cosine_map@100
value: 0.9791666666666666
name: Cosine Map@100
verified: no
Likes: 0 | All-time downloads: 11
Created: 2025-04-29 03:45:32