Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 13th March 2024

llm-claude-3 0.3. Anthropic released Claude 3 Haiku today, their least expensive model: $0.25/million tokens of input, $1.25/million of output (GPT-3.5 Turbo is $0.50/$1.50). Unlike GPT-3.5 Haiku also supports image inputs.

I just released a minor update to my llm-claude-3 LLM plugin adding support for the new model. # 9:18 pm

Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard. The team behind Berkeley’s Gorilla OpenFunctions model—an Apache 2 licensed LLM trained to provide OpenAI-style structured JSON functions—also maintain a leaderboard of different function-calling models. Their own Gorilla model is the only non-proprietary model in the top ten. # 5:26 pm

The talk track I’ve been using is that LLMs are easy to take to market, but hard to keep in the market long-term. All the hard stuff comes when you move past the demo and get exposure to real users.

And that’s where you find that all the nice little things you got neatly working fall apart. And you need to prompt differently, do different retrieval, consider fine-tuning, redesign interaction, etc. People will treat this stuff differently from “normal” products, creating unique challenges.

Phillip Carter # 3:02 pm

pywebview 5 (via) pywebview is a library for building desktop (and now Android) applications using Python, based on the idea of displaying windows that use the system default browser to display an interface to the user—styled such that the fact they run on HTML, CSS and JavaScript is mostly hidden from the end-user.

It’s a bit like a much simpler version of Electron. Unlike Electron it doesn’t bundle a full browser engine (Electron bundles Chromium), which reduces the size of the dependency a lot but does mean that cross-browser differences (quite rare these days) do come back into play.

I tried out their getting started example and it’s very pleasant to use—import webview, create a window and then start the application loop running to display it.

You can register JavaScript functions that call back to Python, and you can execute JavaScript in a window from your Python code. # 2:15 pm

The Bing Cache thinks GPT-4.5 is coming. I was able to replicate this myself earlier today: searching Bing (or apparently Duck Duck Go) for “openai announces gpt-4.5 turbo” would return a link to a 404 page at openai.com/blog/gpt-4-5-turbo with a search result page snippet that announced 256,000 tokens and knowledge cut-off of June 2024

I thought the knowledge cut-off must have been a hallucination, but someone got a screenshot of it showing up in the search engine snippet which would suggest that it was real text that got captured in a cache somehow.

I guess this means we might see GPT 4.5 in June then? I have trouble believing that OpenAI would release a model in June with a June knowledge cut-off, given how much time they usually spend red-teaming their models before release.

Or maybe it was one of those glitches like when a newspaper accidentally publishes a pre-written obituary for someone who hasn’t died yet—OpenAI may have had a draft post describing a model that doesn’t exist yet and it accidentally got exposed to search crawlers. # 2:29 am