Re: Factor

It’s been pretty hard to avoid all of the incredible stories about artificial intelligence over the past few months. There seem to be incredible applications to the area of generative AI occurring on a daily basis. Image generation with Midjourney is pretty next-level. Code generation using GitHub Copilot seems pretty amazing. Interacting with large language models like GPT-4 or Bard or Bing Chat or Facebook LLaMA or StableLM and so many others seems like science fiction. Audio models like Whisper used for audio transcription even make popular audio assistants look pretty dated.

With all of the hype, it seemed inevitable that Factor would gain some kind of AI functionality.

Despite the non-profit vs for-profit controversy of OpenAI, they do seem to have a momentary lead in the race to make tools that others can build upon. One of those tools is the OpenAI API, which is made available using JSON and HTTP. Besides the OpenAI API Reference, there is an OpenAI Cookbook and popular libraries such as OpenAI Python for building systems using it.

Recently, I contributed the openai vocabulary which allows using all the methods currently made available by OpenAI. You will need an OpenAI API Key.

Once you obtain that, you can set it in the listener.

IN: scratchpad USE: openai

IN: scratchpad "sk-....................." openai-api-key set-global

And now you have enough to try it out…

IN: scratchpad "what is the factor programming language"
               "text-davinci-003" <completion>
               100 >>max_tokens create-completion
               "choices" of first "text" of print

Factor is a stack-oriented programming language, designed for creating
flexible, reusable software components. It combines elements from both
object-oriented and functional programming, and provides powerful features,
including static typing and static type checking, an interactive program
development environment, built-in automated testing, and a wide range of
built-in data types. The language is designed to be easy to use, yet provide
a high degree of flexibility.

Cool!

We even have a Discord bot using OpenAI that answers on the Factor Discord server.