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Weeknotes: Parquet in Datasette Lite, various talks, more LLM hacking
I’ve fallen a bit behind on my weeknotes. Here’s a catchup for the last few weeks.
[... 769 words]It’s infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input
One of the most common concerns I see about large language models regards their training data. People are worried that anything they say to ChatGPT could be memorized by it and spat out to other users. People are concerned that anything they store in a private repository on GitHub might be used as training data for future versions of Copilot.
[... 1,465 words]ChatGPT should include inline tips
In OpenAI isn’t doing enough to make ChatGPT’s limitations clear James Vincent argues that OpenAI’s existing warnings about ChatGPT’s confounding ability to convincingly make stuff up are not effective.
[... 1,488 words]Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused
Legal Twitter is having tremendous fun right now reviewing the latest documents from the case Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (1:22-cv-01461). Here’s a neat summary:
[... 2,844 words]llm, ttok and strip-tags—CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs
I’ve been building out a small suite of command-line tools for working with ChatGPT, GPT-4 and potentially other language models in the future.
[... 1,328 words]Delimiters won’t save you from prompt injection
Prompt injection remains an unsolved problem. The best we can do at the moment, disappointingly, is to raise awareness of the issue. As I pointed out last week, “if you don’t understand it, you are doomed to implement it.”
[... 1,010 words]Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.31, download-esm, Python in a sandbox
A couple of speaking appearances last week—one planned, one unplanned. Plus sqlite-utils 3.31, download-esm and a new TIL.
Big Opportunities in Small Data
I gave an invited keynote at Citus Con 2023, the PostgreSQL conference. Below is the abstract, video, slides and links from the presentation.
[... 385 words]Leaked Google document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”
SemiAnalysis published something of a bombshell leaked document this morning: Google “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”.
[... 1,073 words]Midjourney 5.1
Midjourney released version 5.1 of their image generation model on Tuesday. Here’s their announcement on Twitter—if you have a Discord account there’s a more detailed Discord announcement here.
[... 396 words]Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript
I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).
[... 3,120 words]download-esm: a tool for downloading ECMAScript modules
I’ve built a new CLI tool, download-esm, which takes the name of an npm package and will attempt to download the ECMAScript module version of that package, plus all of its dependencies, directly from the jsDelivr CDN—and then rewrite all of the import statements to point to those local copies.
[... 1,240 words]Let’s be bear or bunny
The Machine Learning Compilation group (MLC) are my favourite team of AI researchers at the moment.
[... 599 words]Weeknotes: Miscellaneous research into Rye, ChatGPT Code Interpreter and openai-to-sqlite
I gave myself some time off stressing about my core responsibilities this week after PyCon, which meant allowing myself to be distracted by some miscellaneous research projects.
[... 891 words]Enriching data with GPT3.5 and SQLite SQL functions
I shipped openai-to-sqlite 0.3 yesterday with a fun new feature: you can now use the command-line tool to enrich data in a SQLite database by running values through an OpenAI model and saving the results, all in a single SQL query.
[... 1,219 words]The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection
I really want an AI assistant: a Large Language Model powered chatbot that can answer questions and perform actions for me based on access to my private data and tools.
[... 2,632 words]Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums
I’ve had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, “Big Opportunities in Small Data”. I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, “Data analysis with SQLite and Python”.
[... 225 words]Data analysis with SQLite and Python for PyCon 2023
I’m at PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake City this week.
[... 347 words]What’s in the RedPajama-Data-1T LLM training set
RedPajama is “a project to create leading open-source models, starts by reproducing LLaMA training dataset of over 1.2 trillion tokens”. It’s a collaboration between Together, Ontocord.ai, ETH DS3Lab, Stanford CRFM, Hazy Research, and MILA Québec AI Institute.
[... 1,077 words]Web LLM runs the vicuna-7b Large Language Model entirely in your browser, and it’s very impressive
A month ago I asked Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85,000 and run it in a browser?. $85,000 was a hypothetical training cost for LLaMA 7B plus Stanford Alpaca. “Run it in a browser” was based on the fact that Web Stable Diffusion runs a 1.9GB Stable Diffusion model in a browser, so maybe it’s not such a big leap to run a small Large Language Model there as well.
[... 2,276 words]sqlite-history: tracking changes to SQLite tables using triggers (also weeknotes)
In between blogging about ChatGPT rhetoric, micro-benchmarking with ChatGPT Code Interpreter and Why prompt injection is an even bigger problem now I managed to ship the beginnings of a new project: sqlite-history.
[... 1,680 words]Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen?
Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now.
[... 2,302 words]Running Python micro-benchmarks using the ChatGPT Code Interpreter alpha
Today I wanted to understand the performance difference between two Python implementations of a mechanism to detect changes to a SQLite database schema. I rendered the difference between the two as this chart:
[... 2,939 words]Thoughts on AI safety in this era of increasingly powerful open source LLMs
This morning, VentureBeat published a story by Sharon Goldman: With a wave of new LLMs, open source AI is having a moment — and a red-hot debate. It covers the explosion in activity around openly available Large Language Models such as LLaMA—a trend I’ve been tracking in my own series LLMs on personal devices—and talks about their implications with respect to AI safety.
[... 782 words]The Changelog podcast: LLMs break the internet
I’m the guest on the latest episode of The Changelog podcast: LLMs break the internet. It’s a follow-up to the episode we recorded six months ago about Stable Diffusion.
[... 454 words]Working in public
I participated in a panel discussion this week for path to Citus Con, a series of Discord audio events that are happening in the run up to the Citus Con 2023 later this month.
[... 546 words]We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the most precise terminology to use to describe it.
[... 1,174 words]Weeknotes: A new llm CLI tool, plus automating my weeknotes and newsletter
I started publishing weeknotes in 2019 partly as a way to hold myself accountable but mainly as a way to encourage myself to write more.
[... 830 words]Semi-automating a Substack newsletter with an Observable notebook
I recently started sending out a weekly-ish email newsletter consisting of content from my blog. I’ve mostly automated that, using an Observable Notebook to generate the HTML. Here’s how that system works.
[... 2,520 words]Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words”
One of the most pervasive mistakes I see people using with large language model tools like ChatGPT is trying to use them as a search engine.
[... 1,162 words]