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Qwen2-VL: To See the World More Clearly. Qwen is Alibaba Cloud's organization training LLMs. Their latest model is Qwen2-VL - a vision LLM - and it's getting some really positive buzz. Here's a r/LocalLLaMA thread about the model.
The original Qwen models were licensed under their custom Tongyi Qianwen license, but starting with Qwen2 on June 7th 2024 they switched to Apache 2.0, at least for their smaller models:
While Qwen2-72B as well as its instruction-tuned models still uses the original Qianwen License, all other models, including Qwen2-0.5B, Qwen2-1.5B, Qwen2-7B, and Qwen2-57B-A14B, turn to adopt Apache 2.0
Here's where things get odd: shortly before I first published this post the Qwen GitHub organization, and their GitHub pages hosted blog, both disappeared and returned 404s pages. I asked on Twitter but nobody seems to know what's happened to them.
Update: this was accidental and was resolved on 5th September.
The Qwen Hugging Face page is still up - it's just the GitHub organization that has mysteriously vanished.
Inspired by Dylan Freedman I tried the model using GanymedeNil/Qwen2-VL-7B on Hugging Face Spaces, and found that it was exceptionally good at extracting text from unruly handwriting:
The model apparently runs great on NVIDIA GPUs, and very slowly using the MPS PyTorch backend on Apple Silicon. Qwen previously released MLX builds of their non-vision Qwen2 models, so hopefully there will be an Apple Silicon optimized MLX model for Qwen2-VL soon as well.
Python Developers Survey 2023 Results (via) The seventh annual Python survey is out. Here are the things that caught my eye or that I found surprising:
25% of survey respondents had been programming in Python for less than a year, and 33% had less than a year of professional experience.
37% of Python developers reported contributing to open-source projects last year - a new question for the survey. This is delightfully high!
6% of users are still using Python 2. The survey notes:
Almost half of Python 2 holdouts are under 21 years old and a third are students. Perhaps courses are still using Python 2?
In web frameworks, Flask and Django neck and neck at 33% each, but FastAPI is a close third at 29%! Starlette is at 6%, but that's an under-count because it's the basis for FastAPI.
The most popular library in "other framework and libraries" was BeautifulSoup with 31%, then Pillow 28%, then OpenCV-Python at 22% (wow!) and Pydantic at 22%. Tkinter had 17%. These numbers are all a surprise to me.
pytest scores 52% for unit testing, unittest from the standard library just 25%. I'm glad to see pytest so widely used, it's my favourite testing tool across any programming language.
The top cloud providers are AWS, then Google Cloud Platform, then Azure... but PythonAnywhere (11%) took fourth place just ahead of DigitalOcean (10%). And Alibaba Cloud is a new entrant in sixth place (after Heroku) with 4%. Heroku's ending of its free plan dropped them from 14% in 2021 to 7% now.
Linux and Windows equal at 55%, macOS is at 29%. This was one of many multiple-choice questions that could add up to more than 100%.
In databases, SQLite usage was trending down - 38% in 2021 to 34% for 2023, but still in second place behind PostgreSQL, stable at 43%.
The survey incorporates quotes from different Python experts responding to the numbers, it's worth reading through the whole thing.
Why I Still Use Python Virtual Environments in Docker (via) Hynek Schlawack argues for using virtual environments even when running Python applications in a Docker container. This argument was most convincing to me:
I'm responsible for dozens of services, so I appreciate the consistency of knowing that everything I'm deploying is in
/app, and if it's a Python application, I know it's a virtual environment, and if I run/app/bin/python, I get the virtual environment's Python with my application ready to be imported and run.
Also:
It’s good to use the same tools and primitives in development and in production.
Also worth a look: Hynek's guide to Production-ready Docker Containers with uv, an actively maintained guide that aims to reflect ongoing changes made to uv itself.
In Leak, Facebook Partner Brags About Listening to Your Phone’s Microphone to Serve Ads for Stuff You Mention. (I've repurposed some of my comments on Lobsters into this commentary on this article. See also I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone.)
Which is more likely?
- All of the conspiracy theories are real! The industry managed to keep the evidence from us for decades, but finally a marketing agency of a local newspaper chain has blown the lid off the whole thing, in a bunch of blog posts and PDFs and on a podcast.
- Everyone believed that their phone was listening to them even when it wasn’t. The marketing agency of a local newspaper chain were the first group to be caught taking advantage of that widespread paranoia and use it to try and dupe people into spending money with them, despite the tech not actually working like that.
My money continues to be on number 2.
Here’s their pitch deck. My “this is a scam” sense is vibrating like crazy reading it: CMG Pitch Deck on Voice-Data Advertising 'Active Listening'.
It does not read to me like the deck of a company that has actually shipped their own app that tracks audio and uses it for even the most basic version of ad targeting.
They give the game away on the last two slides:
Prep work:
- Create buyer personas by uploading past consumer data into the platform
- Identify top performing keywords relative to your products and services by analyzing keyword data and past ad campaigns
- Ensure tracking is set up via a tracking pixel placed on your site or landing page
Now that preparation is done:
- Active listening begins in your target geo and buyer behavior is detected across 470+ data sources […]
Our technology analyzes over 1.9 trillion behaviors daily and collects opt-in customer behavior data from hundreds of popular websites that offer top display, video platforms, social applications, and mobile marketplaces that allow laser-focused media buying.
Sources include: Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon and many more
That’s not describing anything ground-breaking or different. That’s how every targeting ad platform works: you upload a bunch of “past consumer data”, identify top keywords and setup a tracking pixel.
I think active listening is the term that the team came up with for “something that sounds fancy but really just means the way ad targeting platforms work already”. Then they got over-excited about the new metaphor and added that first couple of slides that talk about “voice data”, without really understanding how the tech works or what kind of a shitstorm that could kick off when people who DID understand technology started paying attention to their marketing.
TechDirt's story Cox Media Group Brags It Spies On Users With Device Microphones To Sell Targeted Ads, But It’s Not Clear They Actually Can included a quote with a clarification from Cox Media Group:
CMG businesses do not listen to any conversations or have access to anything beyond a third-party aggregated, anonymized and fully encrypted data set that can be used for ad placement. We regret any confusion and we are committed to ensuring our marketing is clear and transparent.
Why I don't buy the argument that it's OK for people to believe this
I've seen variants of this argument before: phones do creepy things to target ads, but it’s not exactly “listen through your microphone” - but there’s no harm in people believing that if it helps them understand that there’s creepy stuff going on generally.
I don’t buy that. Privacy is important. People who are sufficiently engaged need to be able to understand exactly what’s going on, so they can e.g. campaign for legislators to reign in the most egregious abuses.
I think it’s harmful letting people continue to believe things about privacy that are not true, when we should instead be helping them understand the things that are true.
This discussion thread is full of technically minded, engaged people who still believe an inaccurate version of what their devices are doing. Those are the people that need to have an accurate understanding, because those are the people that can help explain it to others and can hopefully drive meaningful change.
This is such a damaging conspiracy theory.
- It’s causing some people to stop trusting their most important piece of personal technology: their phone.
- We risk people ignoring REAL threats because they’ve already decided to tolerate made up ones.
- If people believe this and see society doing nothing about it, that’s horrible. That leads to a cynical “nothing can be fixed, I guess we will just let bad people get away with it” attitude. People need to believe that humanity can prevent this kind of abuse from happening.
The fact that nobody has successfully produced an experiment showing that this is happening is one of the main reasons I don’t believe it to be happening.
It’s like James Randi’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge - the very fact that nobody has been able to demonstrate it is enough for me not to believe in it.
Anatomy of a Textual User Interface. Will McGugan used Textual and my LLM Python library to build a delightful TUI for talking to a simulation of Mother, the AI from the Aliens movies:
The entire implementation is just 77 lines of code. It includes PEP 723 inline dependency information:
# /// script # requires-python = ">=3.12" # dependencies = [ # "llm", # "textual", # ] # ///
Which means you can run it in a dedicated environment with the correct dependencies installed using uv run like this:
wget 'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/willmcgugan/648a537c9d47dafa59cb8ece281d8c2c/raw/7aa575c389b31eb041ae7a909f2349a96ffe2a48/mother.py'
export OPENAI_API_KEY='sk-...'
uv run mother.pyI found the send_prompt() method particularly interesting. Textual uses asyncio for its event loop, but LLM currently only supports synchronous execution and can block for several seconds while retrieving a prompt.
Will used the Textual @work(thread=True) decorator, documented here, to run that operation in a thread:
@work(thread=True) def send_prompt(self, prompt: str, response: Response) -> None: response_content = "" llm_response = self.model.prompt(prompt, system=SYSTEM) for chunk in llm_response: response_content += chunk self.call_from_thread(response.update, response_content)
Looping through the response like that and calling self.call_from_thread(response.update, response_content) with an accumulated string is all it takes to implement streaming responses in the Textual UI, and that Response object sublasses textual.widgets.Markdown so any Markdown is rendered using Rich.
uvtrick (via) This "fun party trick" by Vincent D. Warmerdam is absolutely brilliant and a little horrifying. The following code:
from uvtrick import Env def uses_rich(): from rich import print print("hi :vampire:") Env("rich", python="3.12").run(uses_rich)
Executes that uses_rich() function in a fresh virtual environment managed by uv, running the specified Python version (3.12) and ensuring the rich package is available - even if it's not installed in the current environment.
It's taking advantage of the fact that uv is so fast that the overhead of getting this to work is low enough for it to be worth at least playing with the idea.
The real magic is in how uvtrick works. It's only 127 lines of code with some truly devious trickery going on.
That Env.run() method:
- Creates a temporary directory
- Pickles the
argsandkwargsand saves them topickled_inputs.pickle - Uses
inspect.getsource()to retrieve the source code of the function passed torun() - Writes that to a
pytemp.pyfile, along with a generatedif __name__ == "__main__":block that calls the function with the pickled inputs and saves its output to another pickle file calledtmp.pickle
Having created the temporary Python file it executes the program using a command something like this:
uv run --with rich --python 3.12 --quiet pytemp.pyIt reads the output from tmp.pickle and returns it to the caller!
OpenAI says ChatGPT usage has doubled since last year. Official ChatGPT usage numbers don't come along very often:
OpenAI said on Thursday that ChatGPT now has more than 200 million weekly active users — twice as many as it had last November.
Axios reported this first, then Emma Roth at The Verge confirmed that number with OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson, adding:
Additionally, Christianson says that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI's products, while API usage has doubled following the release of the company's cheaper and smarter model GPT-4o Mini.
Does that mean API usage doubled in just the past five weeks? According to OpenAI's Head of Product, API Olivier Godement it does :
The article is accurate. :-)
The metric that doubled was tokens processed by the API.
llm-claude-3 0.4.1. New minor release of my LLM plugin that provides access to the Claude 3 family of models. Claude 3.5 Sonnet recently upgraded to a 8,192 output limit recently (up from 4,096 for the Claude 3 family of models). LLM can now respect that.
The hardest part of building this was convincing Claude to return a long enough response to prove that it worked. At one point I got into an argument with it, which resulted in this fascinating hallucination:
I eventually got a 6,162 token output using:
cat long.txt | llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet-long --system 'translate this document into french, then translate the french version into spanish, then translate the spanish version back to english. actually output the translations one by one, and be sure to do the FULL document, every paragraph should be translated correctly. Seriously, do the full translations - absolutely no summaries!'
Leader Election With S3 Conditional Writes (via) Amazon S3 added support for conditional writes last week, so you can now write a key to S3 with a reliable failure if someone else has has already created it.
This is a big deal. It reminds me of the time in 2020 when S3 added read-after-write consistency, an astonishing piece of distributed systems engineering.
Gunnar Morling demonstrates how this can be used to implement a distributed leader election system. The core flow looks like this:
- Scan an S3 bucket for files matching
lock_*- likelock_0000000001.json. If the highest number contains{"expired": false}then that is the leader - If the highest lock has expired, attempt to become the leader yourself: increment that lock ID and then attempt to create
lock_0000000002.jsonwith a PUT request that includes the newIf-None-Match: *header - set the file content to{"expired": false} - If that succeeds, you are the leader! If not then someone else beat you to it.
- To resign from leadership, update the file with
{"expired": true}
There's a bit more to it than that - Gunnar also describes how to implement lock validity timeouts such that a crashed leader doesn't leave the system leaderless.
OpenAI: Improve file search result relevance with chunk ranking (via) I've mostly been ignoring OpenAI's Assistants API. It provides an alternative to their standard messages API where you construct "assistants", chatbots with optional access to additional tools and that store full conversation threads on the server so you don't need to pass the previous conversation with every call to their API.
I'm pretty comfortable with their existing API and I found the assistants API to be quite a bit more complicated. So far the only thing I've used it for is a script to scrape OpenAI Code Interpreter to keep track of updates to their enviroment's Python packages.
Code Interpreter aside, the other interesting assistants feature is File Search. You can upload files in a wide variety of formats and OpenAI will chunk them, store the chunks in a vector store and make them available to help answer questions posed to your assistant - it's their version of hosted RAG.
Prior to today OpenAI had kept the details of how this worked undocumented. I found this infuriating, because when I'm building a RAG system the details of how files are chunked and scored for relevance is the whole game - without understanding that I can't make effective decisions about what kind of documents to use and how to build on top of the tool.
This has finally changed! You can now run a "step" (a round of conversation in the chat) and then retrieve details of exactly which chunks of the file were used in the response and how they were scored using the following incantation:
run_step = client.beta.threads.runs.steps.retrieve( thread_id="thread_abc123", run_id="run_abc123", step_id="step_abc123", include=[ "step_details.tool_calls[*].file_search.results[*].content" ] )
(See what I mean about the API being a little obtuse?)
I tried this out today and the results were very promising. Here's a chat transcript with an assistant I created against an old PDF copy of the Datasette documentation - I used the above new API to dump out the full list of snippets used to answer the question "tell me about ways to use spatialite".
It pulled in a lot of content! 57,017 characters by my count, spread across 20 search results (customizable), for a total of 15,021 tokens as measured by ttok. At current GPT-4o-mini prices that would cost 0.225 cents (less than a quarter of a cent), but with regular GPT-4o it would cost 7.5 cents.
OpenAI provide up to 1GB of vector storage for free, then charge $0.10/GB/day for vector storage beyond that. My 173 page PDF seems to have taken up 728KB after being chunked and stored, so that GB should stretch a pretty long way.
Confession: I couldn't be bothered to work through the OpenAI code examples myself, so I hit Ctrl+A on that web page and copied the whole lot into Claude 3.5 Sonnet, then prompted it:
Based on this documentation, write me a Python CLI app (using the Click CLi library) with the following features:
openai-file-chat add-files name-of-vector-store *.pdf *.txt
This creates a new vector store called name-of-vector-store and adds all the files passed to the command to that store.
openai-file-chat name-of-vector-store1 name-of-vector-store2 ...
This starts an interactive chat with the user, where any time they hit enter the question is answered by a chat assistant using the specified vector stores.
We iterated on this a few times to build me a one-off CLI app for trying out the new features. It's got a few bugs that I haven't fixed yet, but it was a very productive way of prototyping against the new API.
Anthropic’s Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial (via) Anthropic continue their trend of offering the best documentation of any of the leading LLM vendors. This tutorial is delivered as a set of Jupyter notebooks - I used it as an excuse to try uvx like this:
git clone https://github.com/anthropics/courses
uvx --from jupyter-core jupyter notebook coursesThis installed a working Jupyter system, started the server and launched my browser within a few seconds.
The first few chapters are pretty basic, demonstrating simple prompts run through the Anthropic API. I used %pip install anthropic instead of !pip install anthropic to make sure the package was installed in the correct virtual environment, then filed an issue and a PR.
One new-to-me trick: in the first chapter the tutorial suggests running this:
API_KEY = "your_api_key_here" %store API_KEY
This stashes your Anthropic API key in the IPython store. In subsequent notebooks you can restore the API_KEY variable like this:
%store -r API_KEY
I poked around and on macOS those variables are stored in files of the same name in ~/.ipython/profile_default/db/autorestore.
Chapter 4: Separating Data and Instructions included some interesting notes on Claude's support for content wrapped in XML-tag-style delimiters:
Note: While Claude can recognize and work with a wide range of separators and delimeters, we recommend that you use specifically XML tags as separators for Claude, as Claude was trained specifically to recognize XML tags as a prompt organizing mechanism. Outside of function calling, there are no special sauce XML tags that Claude has been trained on that you should use to maximally boost your performance. We have purposefully made Claude very malleable and customizable this way.
Plus this note on the importance of avoiding typos, with a nod back to the problem of sandbagging where models match their intelligence and tone to that of their prompts:
This is an important lesson about prompting: small details matter! It's always worth it to scrub your prompts for typos and grammatical errors. Claude is sensitive to patterns (in its early years, before finetuning, it was a raw text-prediction tool), and it's more likely to make mistakes when you make mistakes, smarter when you sound smart, sillier when you sound silly, and so on.
Chapter 5: Formatting Output and Speaking for Claude includes notes on one of Claude's most interesting features: prefill, where you can tell it how to start its response:
client.messages.create( model="claude-3-haiku-20240307", max_tokens=100, messages=[ {"role": "user", "content": "JSON facts about cats"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "{"} ] )
Things start to get really interesting in Chapter 6: Precognition (Thinking Step by Step), which suggests using XML tags to help the model consider different arguments prior to generating a final answer:
Is this review sentiment positive or negative? First, write the best arguments for each side in <positive-argument> and <negative-argument> XML tags, then answer.
The tags make it easy to strip out the "thinking out loud" portions of the response.
It also warns about Claude's sensitivity to ordering. If you give Claude two options (e.g. for sentiment analysis):
In most situations (but not all, confusingly enough), Claude is more likely to choose the second of two options, possibly because in its training data from the web, second options were more likely to be correct.
This effect can be reduced using the thinking out loud / brainstorming prompting techniques.
A related tip is proposed in Chapter 8: Avoiding Hallucinations:
How do we fix this? Well, a great way to reduce hallucinations on long documents is to make Claude gather evidence first.
In this case, we tell Claude to first extract relevant quotes, then base its answer on those quotes. Telling Claude to do so here makes it correctly notice that the quote does not answer the question.
I really like the example prompt they provide here, for answering complex questions against a long document:
<question>What was Matterport's subscriber base on the precise date of May 31, 2020?</question>
Please read the below document. Then, in <scratchpad> tags, pull the most relevant quote from the document and consider whether it answers the user's question or whether it lacks sufficient detail. Then write a brief numerical answer in <answer> tags.
Elasticsearch is open source, again (via) Three and a half years ago, Elastic relicensed their core products from Apache 2.0 to dual-license under the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the new Elastic License, neither of which were OSI-compliant open source licenses. They explained this change as a reaction to AWS, who were offering a paid hosted search product that directly competed with Elastic's commercial offering.
AWS were also sponsoring an "open distribution" alternative packaging of Elasticsearch, created in 2019 in response to Elastic releasing components of their package as the "x-pack" under alternative licenses. Stephen O'Grady wrote about that at the time.
AWS subsequently forked Elasticsearch entirely, creating the OpenSearch project in April 2021.
Now Elastic have made another change: they're triple-licensing their core products, adding the OSI-complaint AGPL as the third option.
This announcement of the change from Elastic creator Shay Banon directly addresses the most obvious conclusion we can make from this:
“Changing the license was a mistake, and Elastic now backtracks from it”. We removed a lot of market confusion when we changed our license 3 years ago. And because of our actions, a lot has changed. It’s an entirely different landscape now. We aren’t living in the past. We want to build a better future for our users. It’s because we took action then, that we are in a position to take action now.
By "market confusion" I think he means the trademark disagreement (later resolved) with AWS, who no longer sell their own Elasticsearch but sell OpenSearch instead.
I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation, but if it kicks off a trend of other no-longer-open-source companies returning to the fold I'm all for it!
How Anthropic built Artifacts. Gergely Orosz interviews five members of Anthropic about how they built Artifacts on top of Claude with a small team in just three months.
The initial prototype used Streamlit, and the biggest challenge was building a robust sandbox to run the LLM-generated code in:
We use iFrame sandboxes with full-site process isolation. This approach has gotten robust over the years. This protects users' main Claude.ai browsing session from malicious artifacts. We also use strict Content Security Policies (CSPs) to enforce limited and controlled network access.
Artifacts were launched in general availability yesterday - previously you had to turn them on as a preview feature. Alex Albert has a 14 minute demo video up on Twitter showing the different forms of content they can create, including interactive HTML apps, Markdown, HTML, SVG, Mermaid diagrams and React Components.
Cerebras Inference: AI at Instant Speed (via) New hosted API for Llama running at absurdly high speeds: "1,800 tokens per second for Llama3.1 8B and 450 tokens per second for Llama3.1 70B".
How are they running so fast? Custom hardware. Their WSE-3 is 57x physically larger than an NVIDIA H100, and has 4 trillion transistors, 900,000 cores and 44GB of memory all on one enormous chip.
Their live chat demo just returned me a response at 1,833 tokens/second. Their API currently has a waitlist.
System prompt for val.town/townie (via) Val Town (previously) provides hosting and a web-based coding environment for Vals - snippets of JavaScript/TypeScript that can run server-side as scripts, on a schedule or hosting a web service.
Townie is Val's new AI bot, providing a conversational chat interface for creating fullstack web apps (with blob or SQLite persistence) as Vals.
In the most recent release of Townie Val added the ability to inspect and edit its system prompt!
I've archived a copy in this Gist, as a snapshot of how Townie works today. It's surprisingly short, relying heavily on the model's existing knowledge of Deno and TypeScript.
I enjoyed the use of "tastefully" in this bit:
Tastefully add a view source link back to the user's val if there's a natural spot for it and it fits in the context of what they're building. You can generate the val source url via import.meta.url.replace("esm.town", "val.town").
The prompt includes a few code samples, like this one demonstrating how to use Val's SQLite package:
import { sqlite } from "https://esm.town/v/stevekrouse/sqlite";
let KEY = new URL(import.meta.url).pathname.split("/").at(-1);
(await sqlite.execute(`select * from ${KEY}_users where id = ?`, [1])).rows[0].idIt also reveals the existence of Val's very own delightfully simple image generation endpoint Val, currently powered by Stable Diffusion XL Lightning on fal.ai.
If you want an AI generated image, use https://maxm-imggenurl.web.val.run/the-description-of-your-image to dynamically generate one.
Here's a fun colorful raccoon with a wildly inappropriate hat.
Val are also running their own gpt-4o-mini proxy, free to users of their platform:
import { OpenAI } from "https://esm.town/v/std/openai";
const openai = new OpenAI();
const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
messages: [
{ role: "user", content: "Say hello in a creative way" },
],
model: "gpt-4o-mini",
max_tokens: 30,
});Val developer JP Posma wrote a lot more about Townie in How we built Townie – an app that generates fullstack apps, describing their prototyping process and revealing that the current model it's using is Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Their current system prompt was refined over many different versions - initially they were including 50 example Vals at quite a high token cost, but they were able to reduce that down to the linked system prompt which includes condensed documentation and just one templated example.
Debate over “open source AI” term brings new push to formalize definition. Benj Edwards reports on the latest draft (v0.0.9) of a definition for "Open Source AI" from the Open Source Initiative.
It's been under active development for around a year now, and I think the definition is looking pretty solid. It starts by emphasizing the key values that make an AI system "open source":
An Open Source AI is an AI system made available under terms and in a way that grant the freedoms to:
- Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission.
- Study how the system works and inspect its components.
- Modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output.
- Share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.
These freedoms apply both to a fully functional system and to discrete elements of a system. A precondition to exercising these freedoms is to have access to the preferred form to make modifications to the system.
There is one very notable absence from the definition: while it requires the code and weights be released under an OSI-approved license, the training data itself is exempt from that requirement.
At first impression this is disappointing, but I think it's a pragmatic decision. We still haven't seen a model trained entirely on openly licensed data that's anywhere near the same class as the current batch of open weight models, all of which incorporate crawled web data or other proprietary sources.
For the OSI definition to be relevant, it needs to acknowledge this unfortunate reality of how these models are trained. Without that, we risk having a definition of "Open Source AI" that none of the currently popular models can use!
From a personal perspective, I most value the term "open source" as a label that helps me understand exactly what my rights are for using and building on the software. This OSI definition captures that information.
Instead of requiring the training information, the definition calls for "data information" described like this:
Data information: Sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system, so that a skilled person can recreate a substantially equivalent system using the same or similar data. Data information shall be made available with licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition.
The OSI's FAQ that accompanies the draft further expands on their reasoning:
Training data is valuable to study AI systems: to understand the biases that have been learned and that can impact system behavior. But training data is not part of the preferred form for making modifications to an existing AI system. The insights and correlations in that data have already been learned.
Data can be hard to share. Laws that permit training on data often limit the resharing of that same data to protect copyright or other interests. Privacy rules also give a person the rightful ability to control their most sensitive information – like decisions about their health. Similarly, much of the world’s Indigenous knowledge is protected through mechanisms that are not compatible with later-developed frameworks for rights exclusivity and sharing.
Gemini Chat App. Google released three new Gemini models today: improved versions of Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash plus a new model, Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B, which is significantly faster (and will presumably be cheaper) than the regular Flash model.
The Flash-8B model is described in the Gemini 1.5 family of models paper in section 8:
By inheriting the same core architecture, optimizations, and data mixture refinements as its larger counterpart, Flash-8B demonstrates multimodal capabilities with support for context window exceeding 1 million tokens. This unique combination of speed, quality, and capabilities represents a step function leap in the domain of single-digit billion parameter models.
While Flash-8B’s smaller form factor necessarily leads to a reduction in quality compared to Flash and 1.5 Pro, it unlocks substantial benefits, particularly in terms of high throughput and extremely low latency. This translates to affordable and timely large-scale multimodal deployments, facilitating novel use cases previously deemed infeasible due to resource constraints.
The new models are available in AI Studio, but since I built my own custom prompting tool against the Gemini CORS-enabled API the other day I figured I'd build a quick UI for these new models as well.
Building this with Claude 3.5 Sonnet took literally ten minutes from start to finish - you can see that from the timestamps in the conversation. Here's the deployed app and the finished code.
The feature I really wanted to build was streaming support. I started with this example code showing how to run streaming prompts in a Node.js application, then told Claude to figure out what the client-side code for that should look like based on a snippet from my bounding box interface hack. My starting prompt:
Build me a JavaScript app (no react) that I can use to chat with the Gemini model, using the above strategy for API key usage
I still keep hearing from people who are skeptical that AI-assisted programming like this has any value. It's honestly getting a little frustrating at this point - the gains for things like rapid prototyping are so self-evident now.
NousResearch/DisTrO. DisTrO stands for Distributed Training Over-The-Internet - it's "a family of low latency distributed optimizers that reduce inter-GPU communication requirements by three to four orders of magnitude".
This tweet from @NousResearch helps explain why this could be a big deal:
DisTrO can increase the resilience and robustness of training LLMs by minimizing dependency on a single entity for computation. DisTrO is one step towards a more secure and equitable environment for all participants involved in building LLMs.
Without relying on a single company to manage and control the training process, researchers and institutions can have more freedom to collaborate and experiment with new techniques, algorithms, and models.
Training large models is notoriously expensive in terms of GPUs, and most training techniques require those GPUs to be collocated due to the huge amount of information that needs to be exchanged between them during the training runs.
If DisTrO works as advertised it could enable SETI@home style collaborative training projects, where thousands of home users contribute their GPUs to a larger project.
There are more technical details in the PDF preliminary report shared by Nous Research on GitHub.
I continue to hate reading PDFs on a mobile phone, so I converted that report into GitHub Flavored Markdown (to ensure support for tables) and shared that as a Gist. I used Gemini 1.5 Pro (gemini-1.5-pro-exp-0801) in Google AI Studio with the following prompt:
Convert this PDF to github-flavored markdown, including using markdown for the tables. Leave a bold note for any figures saying they should be inserted separately.
MiniJinja: Learnings from Building a Template Engine in Rust (via) Armin Ronacher's MiniJinja is his re-implemenation of the Python Jinja2 (originally built by Armin) templating language in Rust.
It's nearly three years old now and, in Armin's words, "it's at almost feature parity with Jinja2 and quite enjoyable to use".
The WebAssembly compiled demo in the MiniJinja Playground is fun to try out. It includes the ability to output instructions, so you can see how this:
<ul>
{%- for item in nav %}
<li>{{ item.title }}</a>
{%- endfor %}
</ul>Becomes this:
0 EmitRaw "<ul>"
1 Lookup "nav"
2 PushLoop 1
3 Iterate 11
4 StoreLocal "item"
5 EmitRaw "\n <li>"
6 Lookup "item"
7 GetAttr "title"
8 Emit
9 EmitRaw "</a>"
10 Jump 3
11 PopFrame
12 EmitRaw "\n</ul>"Anthropic Release Notes: System Prompts (via) Anthropic now publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat-based LLM systems - Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet - as part of their documentation, with a promise to update this to reflect future changes.
Currently covers just the initial release of the prompts, each of which is dated July 12th 2024.
Anthropic researcher Amanda Askell broke down their system prompt in detail back in March 2024. These new releases are a much appreciated extension of that transparency.
These prompts are always fascinating to read, because they can act a little bit like documentation that the providers never thought to publish elsewhere.
There are lots of interesting details in the Claude 3.5 Sonnet system prompt. Here's how they handle controversial topics:
If it is asked to assist with tasks involving the expression of views held by a significant number of people, Claude provides assistance with the task regardless of its own views. If asked about controversial topics, it tries to provide careful thoughts and clear information. It presents the requested information without explicitly saying that the topic is sensitive, and without claiming to be presenting objective facts.
Here's chain of thought "think step by step" processing baked into the system prompt itself:
When presented with a math problem, logic problem, or other problem benefiting from systematic thinking, Claude thinks through it step by step before giving its final answer.
Claude's face blindness is also part of the prompt, which makes me wonder if the API-accessed models might more capable of working with faces than I had previously thought:
Claude always responds as if it is completely face blind. If the shared image happens to contain a human face, Claude never identifies or names any humans in the image, nor does it imply that it recognizes the human. [...] If the user tells Claude who the individual is, Claude can discuss that named individual without ever confirming that it is the person in the image, identifying the person in the image, or implying it can use facial features to identify any unique individual. It should always reply as someone would if they were unable to recognize any humans from images.
It's always fun to see parts of these prompts that clearly hint at annoying behavior in the base model that they've tried to correct!
Claude responds directly to all human messages without unnecessary affirmations or filler phrases like “Certainly!”, “Of course!”, “Absolutely!”, “Great!”, “Sure!”, etc. Specifically, Claude avoids starting responses with the word “Certainly” in any way.
Anthropic note that these prompts are for their user-facing products only - they aren't used by the Claude models when accessed via their API.
Long context prompting tips (via) Interesting tips here from Anthropic's documentation about how to best prompt Claude to work with longer documents.
Put longform data at the top: Place your long documents and inputs (~20K+ tokens) near the top of your prompt, above your query, instructions, and examples. This can significantly improve Claude’s performance across all models. Queries at the end can improve response quality by up to 30% in tests, especially with complex, multi-document inputs.
It recommends using not-quite-valid-XML to add those documents to those prompts, and using a prompt that asks Claude to extract direct quotes before replying to help it focus its attention on the most relevant information:
Find quotes from the patient records and appointment history that are relevant to diagnosing the patient's reported symptoms. Place these in <quotes> tags. Then, based on these quotes, list all information that would help the doctor diagnose the patient's symptoms. Place your diagnostic information in <info> tags.
AI-powered Git Commit Function
(via)
Andrej Karpathy built a shell alias, gcm, which passes your staged Git changes to an LLM via my LLM tool, generates a short commit message and then asks you if you want to "(a)ccept, (e)dit, (r)egenerate, or (c)ancel?".
Here's the incantation he's using to generate that commit message:
git diff --cached | llm "
Below is a diff of all staged changes, coming from the command:
\`\`\`
git diff --cached
\`\`\`
Please generate a concise, one-line commit message for these changes."This pipes the data into LLM (using the default model, currently gpt-4o-mini unless you set it to something else) and then appends the prompt telling it what to do with that input.
My @covidsewage bot now includes useful alt text. I've been running a @covidsewage Mastodon bot for a while now, posting daily screenshots (taken with shot-scraper) of the Santa Clara County COVID in wastewater dashboard.
Prior to today the screenshot was accompanied by the decidedly unhelpful alt text "Screenshot of the latest Covid charts".
I finally fixed that today, closing issue #2 more than two years after I first opened it.
The screenshot is of a Microsoft Power BI dashboard. I hoped I could scrape the key information out of it using JavaScript, but the weirdness of their DOM proved insurmountable.
Instead, I'm using GPT-4o - specifically, this Python code (run using a python -c block in the GitHub Actions YAML file):
import base64, openai client = openai.OpenAI() with open('/tmp/covid.png', 'rb') as image_file: encoded_image = base64.b64encode(image_file.read()).decode('utf-8') messages = [ {'role': 'system', 'content': 'Return the concentration levels in the sewersheds - single paragraph, no markdown'}, {'role': 'user', 'content': [ {'type': 'image_url', 'image_url': { 'url': 'data:image/png;base64,' + encoded_image }} ]} ] completion = client.chat.completions.create(model='gpt-4o', messages=messages) print(completion.choices[0].message.content)
I'm base64 encoding the screenshot and sending it with this system prompt:
Return the concentration levels in the sewersheds - single paragraph, no markdown
Given this input image:
Here's the text that comes back:
The concentration levels of SARS-CoV-2 in the sewersheds from collected samples are as follows: San Jose Sewershed has a high concentration, Palo Alto Sewershed has a high concentration, Sunnyvale Sewershed has a high concentration, and Gilroy Sewershed has a medium concentration.
The full implementation can be found in the GitHub Actions workflow, which runs on a schedule at 7am Pacific time every day.
SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL (via) A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024.
A key idea is here is to fix one of the biggest usability problems with standard SQL: the order of the clauses in a query. Starting with SELECT instead of FROM has always been confusing, see SQL queries don't start with SELECT by Julia Evans.
Here's an example of the new alternative syntax, taken from the Pipe query syntax documentation that was added to Google's open source ZetaSQL project last week.
For this SQL query:
SELECT component_id, COUNT(*)
FROM ticketing_system_table
WHERE
assignee_user.email = 'username@email.com'
AND status IN ('NEW', 'ASSIGNED', 'ACCEPTED')
GROUP BY component_id
ORDER BY component_id DESC;The Pipe query alternative would look like this:
FROM ticketing_system_table
|> WHERE
assignee_user.email = 'username@email.com'
AND status IN ('NEW', 'ASSIGNED', 'ACCEPTED')
|> AGGREGATE COUNT(*)
GROUP AND ORDER BY component_id DESC;
The Google Research paper is released as a two-column PDF. I snarked about this on Hacker News:
Google: you are a web company. Please learn to publish your research papers as web pages.
This remains a long-standing pet peeve of mine. PDFs like this are horrible to read on mobile phones, hard to copy-and-paste from, have poor accessibility (see this Mastodon conversation) and are generally just bad citizens of the web.
Having complained about this I felt compelled to see if I could address it myself. Google's own Gemini Pro 1.5 model can process PDFs, so I uploaded the PDF to Google AI Studio and prompted the gemini-1.5-pro-exp-0801 model like this:
Convert this document to neatly styled semantic HTML
This worked surprisingly well. It output HTML for about half the document and then stopped, presumably hitting the output length limit, but a follow-up prompt of "and the rest" caused it to continue from where it stopped and run until the end.
Here's the result (with a banner I added at the top explaining that it's a conversion): Pipe-Syntax-In-SQL.html
I haven't compared the two completely, so I can't guarantee there are no omissions or mistakes.
The figures from the PDF aren't present - Gemini Pro output tags like <img src="figure1.png" alt="Figure 1: SQL syntactic clause order doesn't match semantic evaluation order. (From [25].)"> but did nothing to help me create those images.
Amusingly the document ends with <p>(A long list of references, which I won't reproduce here to save space.)</p> rather than actually including the references from the paper!
So this isn't a perfect solution, but considering it took just the first prompt I could think of it's a very promising start. I expect someone willing to spend more than the couple of minutes I invested in this could produce a very useful HTML alternative version of the paper with the assistance of Gemini Pro.
One last amusing note: I posted a link to this to Hacker News a few hours ago. Just now when I searched Google for the exact title of the paper my HTML version was already the third result!
I've now added a <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> tag to the top of the HTML to keep this unverified AI slop out of their search index. This is a good reminder of how much better HTML is than PDF for sharing information on the web!
Musing about OAuth and LLMs on Mastodon. Lots of people are asking why Anthropic and OpenAI don't support OAuth, so you can bounce users through those providers to get a token that uses their API budget for your app.
My guess: they're worried malicious app developers would use it to trick people and obtain valid API keys.
Imagine a version of my dumb little write a haiku about a photo you take page which used OAuth, harvested API keys and then racked up hundreds of dollar bills against everyone who tried it out running illicit election interference campaigns or whatever.
I'm trying to think of an OAuth API that dishes out tokens which effectively let you spend money on behalf of your users and I can't think of any - OAuth is great for "grant this app access to data that I want to share", but "spend money on my behalf" is a whole other ball game.
I guess there's a version of this that could work: it's OAuth but users get to set a spending limit of e.g. $1 (maybe with the authenticating app suggesting what that limit should be).
Here's a counter-example from Mike Taylor of a category of applications that do use OAuth to authorize spend on behalf of users:
I used to work in advertising and plenty of applications use OAuth to connect your Facebook and Google ads accounts, and they could do things like spend all your budget on disinformation ads, but in practice I haven't heard of a single case. When you create a dev application there are stages of approval so you can only invite a handful of beta users directly until the organization and app gets approved.
In which case maybe the cost for providers here is in review and moderation: if you’re going to run an OAuth API that lets apps spend money on behalf of their users you need to actively monitor your developer community and review and approve their apps.
Top companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns (via) Microsoft’s use of the term “Copilot” is pretty confusing these days - this article appears to be about Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is effectively an internal RAG chatbot with access to your company’s private data from tools like SharePoint.
The concern here isn’t the usual fear of data leaked to the model or prompt injection security concerns. It’s something much more banal: it turns out many companies don’t have the right privacy controls in place to safely enable these tools.
Jack Berkowitz (of Securiti, who sell a product designed to help with data governance):
Particularly around bigger companies that have complex permissions around their SharePoint or their Office 365 or things like that, where the Copilots are basically aggressively summarizing information that maybe people technically have access to but shouldn't have access to.
Now, maybe if you set up a totally clean Microsoft environment from day one, that would be alleviated. But nobody has that.
If your document permissions aren’t properly locked down, anyone in the company who asks the chatbot “how much does everyone get paid here?” might get an instant answer!
This is a fun example of a problem with AI systems caused by them working exactly as advertised.
This is also not a new problem: the article mentions similar concerns introduced when companies tried adopting Google Search Appliance for internal search more than twenty years ago.
Explain ACLs by showing me a SQLite table schema for implementing them. Here’s an example transcript showing one of the common ways I use LLMs. I wanted to develop an understanding of ACLs - Access Control Lists - but I’ve found previous explanations incredibly dry. So I prompted Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
Explain ACLs by showing me a SQLite table schema for implementing them
Asking for explanations using the context of something I’m already fluent in is usually really effective, and an great way to take advantage of the weird abilities of frontier LLMs.
I exported the transcript to a Gist using my Convert Claude JSON to Markdown tool, which I just upgraded to support syntax highlighting of code in artifacts.
light-the-torchis a small utility that wrapspipto ease the installation process for PyTorch distributions liketorch,torchvision,torchaudio, and so on as well as third-party packages that depend on them. It auto-detects compatible CUDA versions from the local setup and installs the correct PyTorch binaries without user interference.
Use it like this:
pip install light-the-torch
ltt install torchIt works by wrapping and patching pip.
#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run (via) This is a really neat pattern. Start your Python script like this:
#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.12"
# dependencies = [
# "flask==3.*",
# ]
# ///
import flask
# ...
And now if you chmod 755 it you can run it on any machine with the uv binary installed like this: ./app.py - and it will automatically create its own isolated environment and run itself with the correct installed dependencies and even the correctly installed Python version.
All of that from putting uv run in the shebang line!
Code from this PR by David Laban.
The dangers of AI agents unfurling hyperlinks and what to do about it (via) Here’s a prompt injection exfiltration vulnerability I hadn’t thought about before: chat systems such as Slack and Discord implement “unfurling”, where any URLs pasted into the chat are fetched in order to show a title and preview image.
If your chat environment includes a chatbot with access to private data and that’s vulnerable to prompt injection, a successful attack could paste a URL to an attacker’s server into the chat in such a way that the act of unfurling that link leaks private data embedded in that URL.
Johann Rehberger notes that apps posting messages to Slack can opt out of having their links unfurled by passing the "unfurl_links": false, "unfurl_media": false properties to the Slack messages API, which can help protect against this exfiltration vector.