LW - Pantheon Interface by NicholasKees

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Pantheon Interface, published by NicholasKees on July 8, 2024 on LessWrong.
Pantheon is an experimental LLM interface exploring a different type of human-AI interaction. We created this as a part of the cyborgism project, with the abstract motivation of augmenting the human ability to think by integrating human and AI generated thoughts.
How it works:
1. A human user "thinks out loud" by typing out their thoughts one at a time. This leaves a text trace of their stream of thought.
2. AI characters (called daemons) read this trace, and interact with the user by responding asynchronously with comments and questions.
The core distinguishing philosophy is that, while most apps are about a human prompting an AI to do useful mental work, Pantheon is the opposite. Here, AI does the prompting, and the goal is for the AI generated questions or comments to cause the human user to think in ways they would not have on their own. At worst, the app is a rubber duck. At best, the app is a court of advisors, each using their own unique skills to push you to think your best thoughts.
Pantheon can be found at pantheon.chat, and we would really appreciate any and all feedback you have.
The app is set up for you to customize your own daemons. We have set up some default daemons to provide inspiration, but we expect the tool to be a lot more useful when they are customized to specific users. If the default daemons don't feel useful, we highly encourage you to try to make your own.
How do I use Pantheon?
First, go to settings and provide an OpenAI API key.
Next, begin typing out your thoughts on some topic. It helps to keep each thought relatively short, sending them to the stream of thought as often as you can. This gives the daemons lots of opportunities to interject and offer their comments. Furthermore, it's usually best to treat this more like a diary or personal notes, rather than as a conversation.
In this spirit, it's better not to wait for them to respond, but to instead continue your train of thought, keeping your focus on your own writing.
What do the daemons see?
Your stream of thought appears in the interface as a chain of individual thoughts. Daemons are called to respond to specific thoughts. When they do, they are given access to all preceding thoughts in the chain, up to and including the thought they were called to. Daemons can only see text the user has written, and they can't see any of the comments made by themselves or other daemons.
We are looking into ways to give the daemons access to their own comment history, but we have not yet made this possible.
After a daemon generates a comment, you can inspect the full chain of thought by clicking on that comment. This will open up a window which will show you everything the LLM saw in the process of generating that response. You can also edit the daemons in settings, as well as toggle them on or off.
Trees, branching, and sections
The text in the interface appears to you as a chain of thoughts, but it is actually a tree. If you hover over a thought, a plus icon will appear. If you click this icon, you can branch the chain. This is often useful if you feel that you have gone down a dead end, or would like to explore a tangent. When there are multiple branches, arrows will appear next to their parent thought, and you can use those arrows to navigate the tree.
If you would like a fresh context, you can make an entirely new tree by opening the "Collection view" in the top left. Furthermore, you can also create a new "section" by clicking the "New Section" button below the input box. This will create a hard section break such that daemons can no longer see any context which came before the break.
How do I save my progress?
Everything you do is automatically saved in local storage. You can also import/export the full app state i...