If you're a machine learning engineer or data scientist working with Generative AI, you know the drill. You've designed a brilliant workflow, chaining together multiple LLMs, vector databases, and custom logic. It works... but it's not great. The quality is mediocre, and you know it can be better. Thus begins the long, arduous journey of manual tuning.
This process is often described as a "dark art." It involves endless tweaking of prompts, swapping out models, and re-orchestrating steps, often based on intuition and trial-and-error. It can take months of a skilled engineer's time, burning through budgets with no guaranteed outcome. But what if there was a better way?
Introducing Cognify: Your Automated Tuning Engine
At Gense, we faced this challenge head-on and built an open-source solution: Cognify. Cognify is an auto-tuning platform designed to systematically and automatically optimize your Gen AI workflows, maximizing quality while minimizing cost and effort.
Instead of relying on guesswork, Cognify treats workflow optimization as a fine-tuning problem. It intelligently explores the vast space of possible configurations to find the one that best meets your goals.
How It Works: The Three "Cogs" of Optimization
Cognify's power lies in its "cogs" — modular tuning methods that can be applied to any workflow. These cogs fall into three categories:
1. Orchestration Cogs
These cogs rethink the very structure of your workflow. Should you use a single- or multi-step summarization process? Should you invoke parallel model calls to achieve better result? Orchestration cogs rearrange and redefine the sequence of operations for optimal flow.
2. Step Cogs
Each step in your workflow is a candidate for improvement. Step cogs modify individual components. This could mean swapping a GPT-4 for a Llama 3 model to balance cost and performance, or changing a piece of code for better reults.
3. Prompt Cogs
The most granular level of tuning. Prompt cogs refine the inputs for each step. They can tweak phrasing or add examples (few-shot learning) to find the perfect prompt that elicits the best response from your model.
The Proof is in the Performance
By combining these cogs, Cognify can navigate millions of potential workflow variations. In one recent case, we took a complex workflow and, with an optimization budget of just $5, Cognify found a configuration that was 2.8 times better than the human-designed original. This process took 24 minutes, not months.
Interactive: Estimate Your Manual Tuning Cost
Curious about what the "dark art" of manual tuning might be costing you? Use our simple calculator to get a rough estimate of the engineering cost associated with manual workflow optimization.
The Future is Automated, Continuous, and Optimized
Cognify represents a fundamental shift in how we build and refine Gen AI solutions. It moves us from a world of slow, expensive, and unscalable manual tuning to one of continuous, automated optimization. As new models and techniques emerge, Cognify can seamlessly integrate them into its tuning process, ensuring your workflows not only start strong but stay at the cutting edge.