I began this project feeling very overwhelmed at the idea of contributing to an open source community. However, the more I learned about open source communities and the impact they have on how technology and software developers, the more excited I became about the idea of being involved in one. I have been thinking recently about the future of technology and where this would leave me as in employee. It is totally bizarre that companies like openAI are so secretive about that source code, making it difficult for people who use that generative engines to understand exactly why they are being given the answers they receive. Therefore, I focused my attention on chat GTP. This may appear counter intuitive as it is anything but open source, but there are still opportunities for the open source community to create bots and programs that use GTP functionalities with the OpenAI API. The more I learned about this, the more I understood how powerful they can be and how even at this level the answers given by the generative model can be influenced by the developers. For example, developers can add secret prompts to use a prompts that will vastly adjust the answers he uses a given. I feel it is important to understand the source code of these open source projects in order to be better informed and better understand the motivations for the answers.
I began searching websites that highlighted good first issues from GitHub and stumbled across a developer it was creating a discord bot using the functionality of chat GTP, and who had posted an issue asking someone to create hey function that would allow the boat to store the memory of its conversation with the user. I requested to be assigned to the issue and once I was, set about working to create this functionality.
There was very little documentation about how the bot worked as all the documentation was for the user rather than the developer. This helped remind me how important documentation is and so all my contributions I documented with comments and an updated readme. Once I was familiar with how the bot worked, I created the necessary API key is with discord and open AI and got it running locally on my system, before attempting to tackle the problem of the memory.
After some research and trial and error I was successful in making the bot remember its previous conversation with the user. I was also able to improve the functionality of the bot and gave the use of multiple ways in which it could recall the memory. One way the user can recall the memory is to simply ask the bot a question about the previous conversation. To allow this easy functionality, I added the previous conversation to the user prompt, and so the bot is always aware of its history with user. This also made it very clear to me just how easy it is to manipulate the information given to use it.
It was very good for me to work on this project as I often work alone, and contributing to someone else’s work to improve it in a way I could help with was an excellent experience. It also helped me learn a lot more about the gtp Community and open source communities in general, giving me a deep understanding of why they are so important and how they can create incredible innovations. It is important that people understand how to chat GTP can be used and manipulated for both good and bad, and knowing how to read and write the API source code is an excellent way to start.