19th April 2023 - Link Blog
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI chatbots sound smart. Washington Post story digging into the C4 dataset—Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, a filtered version of Common Crawl that’s often used for training large language models. They include a neat interactive tool for searching a domain to see if it’s included—TIL that simonwillison.net is the 106,649th ranked site in C4 by number of tokens, 189,767 total—0.0001% of the total token volume in C4.
Recent articles
- New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging - 4th August 2026
- Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp) - 31st July 2026
- OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened - 22nd July 2026