Episode 46: Empowering Democracy with LLMs

With all the reports about the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media, sometimes it feels like one of the biggest threats to democracy is technology. But no technology is inherently good or bad. It’s how you use it that matters. And just as technology has the potential to harm democracy, it also has the potential to enhance it.

In this episode, Vikram Oberoi joins Dr Genevieve Hayes to discuss how he has been using generative AI and large language models (LLMs) to enhance people’s access to NYC council meetings through his work on citymeetings.nyc.

Guest Bio

Vikram Oberoi is a software engineer, fractional CTO and co-owner of Baxter HQ, a boutique early-stage tech product development firm. He also built and operates citymeetings.nyc, an LLM powered tool to make New York City council meetings accessible.

Highlights

• (00:00) Meet Vikram Oberoi
• (01:31) Overview of citymeetings.nyc
• (07:50) Vikram’s journey into local politics
• (12:05) Technical aspects of citymeetings.nyc
• (18:41) Dealing with AI hallucinations
• (25:00) Understanding the different types of AI errors
• (26:05) Case study: Honeycomb’s query feature
• (26:59) Reinforcement learning with human feedback
• (28:32) Choosing between Claude and GPT
• (31:42) The importance of context windows
• (40:31) Effective prompt engineering tips
• (46:11) Final advice for data scientists

Links

• citymeetings.nyc
• Vikram’s website
• Vikram’s talk at NYC School of Data about citymeetings.nyc
• Follow Vikram on X
• Connect with Genevieve on LinkedIn
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