Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?

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The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots that other Plus subscribers can then talk to.

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Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

Visit Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

I presented a ten minute segment at GitHub Universe on Wednesday, ambitiously titled Financial sustainability for open source projects.

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ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI

I attended OpenAI DevDay today, the first OpenAI developer conference. It was a lot. They released a bewildering array of new API tools, which I’m just beginning to wade my way through fully understanding.

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DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema

Visit DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema

I wrote a lot this week. I also did some fun research into new options for self-hosting vector maps and pushed out several new releases of plugins.

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Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL‑E 3

Visit Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL‑E 3

Last year I wrote about my initial experiments with DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generation model. I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun playing with its sequel, DALL-E 3 recently. Here are some notes, including a peek under the hood and some notes on the leaked system prompt.

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Execute Jina embeddings with a CLI using llm-embed-jina

Berlin-based Jina AI just released a new family of embedding models, boasting that they are the “world’s first open-source 8K text embedding model” and that they rival OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 in quality.

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Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

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Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon.

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Weeknotes: PyBay, AI Engineer Summit, Datasette metadata and JavaScript plugins

I’ve had a bit of a slow two weeks in terms of building things and writing code, thanks mainly to a couple of conference appearances. I did review and land a couple of major contributions to Datasette though.

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Open questions for AI engineering

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Last week I gave the closing keynote at the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco. I was asked by the organizers to both summarize the conference, summarize the last year of activity in the space and give the audience something to think about by posing some open questions for them to take home.

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Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V

Visit Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V

GPT4-V is the new mode of GPT-4 that allows you to upload images as part of your conversations. It’s absolutely brilliant. It also provides a whole new set of vectors for prompt injection attacks.

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Weeknotes: the Datasette Cloud API, a podcast appearance and more

Datasette Cloud now has a documented API, plus a podcast appearance, some LLM plugins work and some geospatial excitement.

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Things I’ve learned about building CLI tools in Python

I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up for other people to use too.

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Talking Large Language Models with Rooftop Ruby

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I’m on the latest episode of the Rooftop Ruby podcast with Collin Donnell and Joel Drapper, talking all things LLM.

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Weeknotes: Embeddings, more embeddings and Datasette Cloud

Since my last weeknotes, a flurry of activity. LLM has embeddings support now, and Datasette Cloud has driven some major improvements to the wider Datasette ecosystem.

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Build an image search engine with llm-clip, chat with models with llm chat

Visit Build an image search engine with llm-clip, chat with models with llm chat

LLM is my combination CLI tool and Python library for working with Large Language Models. I just released LLM 0.10 with two significant new features: embedding support for binary files and the llm chat command.

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LLM now provides tools for working with embeddings

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LLM is my Python library and command-line tool for working with language models. I just released LLM 0.9 with a new set of features that extend LLM to provide tools for working with embeddings.

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Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes

Two new alpha releases of Datasette, plus a keynote at WordCamp, a new LLM release, two new LLM plugins and a flurry of TILs.

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Making Large Language Models work for you

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I gave an invited keynote at WordCamp 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland on Friday.

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Datasette Cloud, Datasette 1.0a3, llm-mlc and more

Visit Datasette Cloud, Datasette 1.0a3, llm-mlc and more

Datasette Cloud is now a significant step closer to general availability. The Datasette 1.03 alpha release is out, with a mostly finalized JSON format for 1.0. Plus new plugins for LLM and sqlite-utils and a flurry of things I’ve learned.

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How I make annotated presentations

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Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.

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Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette

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The principle theme for the past few weeks has been plugins.

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Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

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I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Llama 2.

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Run Llama 2 on your own Mac using LLM and Homebrew

Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.

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sqlite-utils now supports plugins

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sqlite-utils 3.34 is out with a major new feature: support for plugins.

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Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the llm-replicate plugin

Visit Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the llm-replicate plugin

The big news today is Llama 2, the new openly licensed Large Language Model from Meta AI. It’s a really big deal:

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Weeknotes: Self-hosted language models with LLM plugins, a new Datasette tutorial, a dozen package releases, a dozen TILs

A lot of stuff to cover from the past two and a half weeks.

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My LLM CLI tool now supports self-hosted language models via plugins

Visit My LLM CLI tool now supports self-hosted language models via plugins

LLM is my command-line utility and Python library for working with large language models such as GPT-4. I just released version 0.5 with a huge new feature: you can now install plugins that add support for additional models to the tool, including models that can run on your own hardware.

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Weeknotes: symbex, LLM prompt templates, a bit of a break

I had a holiday to the UK for a family wedding anniversary and mostly took the time off... except for building symbex, which became one of those projects that kept on inspiring new features.

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Symbex: search Python code for functions and classes, then pipe them into a LLM

Visit Symbex: search Python code for functions and classes, then pipe them into a LLM

I just released a new Python CLI tool called Symbex. It’s a search tool, loosely inspired by ripgrep, which lets you search Python code for functions and classes by name or wildcard, then see just the source code of those matching entities.

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Understanding GPT tokenizers

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Large language models such as GPT-3/4, LLaMA and PaLM work in terms of tokens. They take text, convert it into tokens (integers), then predict which tokens should come next.

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