Assistant Citations/Annotations array is always empty

[jorgeintegrait]

Update 14/12/23 (yeah, European dates )

Some improvement through over-complicating prompt and chain.

@jorgeintegrait

We have seen a notable increase in annotations with the right prompting & a more complicated sourcing technique (below). Always asking for sources and annotations on those sources. We’re currently rewriting initial user questions to capture additional details, and request sources be added.

Separately, since 14/12, and after coincidentally doing the same (cleaning up all unneeded files) annotations seem to come back more reliably.

Finally, to summarize, the only real strategies to utilize in the short term to make annotations within Assistants work well are:

• You can set up a pre-assistant workflow that lists the files you have by name, asks a separate gpt-3.5 instance about which documents should be used for the question, and un-link from the Assistant any files that you think you really don’t need for this thread/interaction. This is the only way that we have notably increased performance, but it is slow and prone to errors when documents don’t have much metadata or bad titles.
• As mentioned, explicitly request this on the user prompt. Include mentions of sources, annotations and retrieval in the Assistant instructions.