Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 24th February 2023

Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing

It’s been a wild couple of weeks.

[... 1763 words]

Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.” # 5:34 pm

Hallucinations = creativity. It [Bing] tries to produce the highest probability continuation of the string using all the data at its disposal. Very often it is correct. Sometimes people have never produced continuations like this. You can clamp down on hallucinations—and it is super-boring. Answers “I don’t know” all the time or only reads what is there in the Search results (also sometimes incorrect). What is missing is the tone of voice: it shouldn’t sound so confident in those situations.

Mikhail Parakhin # 3:37 pm

djngo.com: Portable Django (via) “A 20mb executable zip file with Python 3.6 and Django 2.2. Works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX with x86_64 and aarch64 (yes, Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi).” The latest wizardry from the ecosystem surrounding the Cosmopolitan project, which provides a should-be-impossible mechanism for running the same executable on a bunch of different platforms. This utility by Ariel Núñez bundles Python and Django and SQLite, such that a Django application can become a portable executable ready to run on multiple platforms. It’s currently limited to Python 3.6 and Django 2.2 since those are the versions that run under Cosmopolitan, but I expect we’ll see more recent versions of those dependencies in the future. # 12:52 am

Using Datasette in GitHub Codespaces. A new Datasette tutorial showing how it can be run inside GitHub Codespaces—GitHub’s browser-based development environments—in order to explore and analyze data. I’ve been using Codespaces to run tutorials recently and it’s absolutely fantastic, because it puts every tutorial attendee on a level playing field with respect to their development environments. # 12:40 am

2023 » February

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