Don’t use OpenAI’s outdated tools. Also, don’t rely on prompt engineering to force the output to conform. Instead, use a local LLM and something like jsonformer or parserllm which can provably output well-formed/parseable text.
I’ll be informal to boost your intuition. You know how a parser can reject invalid inputs? Parsers can be generated from grammars, so we can think of the grammars themselves as rejecting invalid inputs too. When we use a grammar for generation, every generated output will be a valid input when parsed, because the grammar can’t build any invalid sentences (by definition!)
For example, suppose we want to generate a JSON object. The grammar for JSON objects starts with an opening curly brace “{”. This means that every parser which accepts JSON objects (and rejects everything else) must start by accepting “{”. So, our generator must start by emitting a “{” as well. Since our language-modeling generators work over probability distributions, this can be accomplished by setting the probability of every token which doesn’t start with “{” to zero.
Well, in the sake of pointing things out, GPT-4 can actually correctly answer the prompt, because it arrives at it in the opposite direction. It can tell the integer is even or odd and knows that even or odd integers in binary end in 0 or 1 respectively.
Yeah, I’m chalking that up to Python’s untypedness. I was going to write “integers”, but technically that function takes a “num”, whatever that is.
For all we know, it could be a string, asking ChatGPT to hack the government. Is that even? Probably no. Or None. Or T-Rex. Without reading the entire function, we don’t know that it’s not returning T-Rex.
Thankfully, it doesn’t matter. Just stick the result into an if-else, then False and None will land you in the else-branch. And both True and our Truthiness-Rex will land you in the if-branch. Just as Guido intended.
While there are not actually any trailing commas in the dictionaries present and you are correct to say the ones present are part of a list, you can also have trailing commas in Python dictionaries. OP might have researched “Python trailing commas” and learned that part.
Trailing commas are fantastic to reduce changed lines in git diffs. Makes life much better. Same thing with leading commas in SQL queries.
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