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Using pip to install a Large Language Model that’s under 100MB
I just released llm-smollm2, a new plugin for LLM that bundles a quantized copy of the SmolLM2-135M-Instruct LLM inside of the Python package.
[... 1,553 words]OpenAI o3-mini, now available in LLM
OpenAI’s o3-mini is out today. As with other o-series models it’s a slightly difficult one to evaluate—we now need to decide if a prompt is best run using GPT-4o, o1, o3-mini or (if we have access) o1 Pro.
[... 748 words]A selfish personal argument for releasing code as Open Source
I’m the guest for the most recent episode of the Real Python podcast with Christopher Bailey, talking about Using LLMs for Python Development. We covered a lot of other topics as well—most notably my relationship with Open Source development over the years.
[... 464 words]Anthropic’s new Citations API
Here’s a new API-only feature from Anthropic that requires quite a bit of assembly in order to unlock the value: Introducing Citations on the Anthropic API. Let’s talk about what this is and why it’s interesting.
[... 1,319 words]Six short video demos of LLM and Datasette projects
Last Friday Alex Garcia and I hosted a new kind of Datasette Public Office Hours session, inviting members of the Datasette community to share short demos of projects that they had built. The session lasted just over an hour and featured demos from six different people.
[... 1,047 words]DeepSeek-R1 and exploring DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3. That model was trained in part using their unreleased R1 “reasoning” model. Today they’ve released R1 itself, along with a whole family of new models derived from that base.
[... 1,276 words]My AI/LLM predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years, for Oxide and Friends
The Oxide and Friends podcast has an annual tradition of asking guests to share their predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years. Here’s 2022, 2023 and 2024. This year they invited me to participate. I’ve never been brave enough to share any public predictions before, so this was a great opportunity to get outside my comfort zone!
[... 2,675 words]Weeknotes: Starting 2025 a little slow
I published my review of 2024 in LLMs and then got into a fight with most of the internet over the phone microphone targeted ads conspiracy theory.
[... 520 words]I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone
One of my weirder hobbies is trying to convince people that the idea that companies are listening to you through your phone’s microphone and serving you targeted ads is a conspiracy theory that isn’t true. I wrote about this previously: Facebook don’t spy on you through your microphone.
[... 698 words]Ending a year long posting streak
A year ago today I wrote about Tom Scott’s legendary 10 year YouTube streak, in which he posted a new video once a week for the next ten years. Inspired by that, I also started my own.
[... 390 words]Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.
[... 7,490 words]Trying out QvQ—Qwen’s new visual reasoning model
I thought we were done for major model releases in 2024, but apparently not: Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Apache 2.0 licensed Qwen licensed (the license changed) QvQ-72B-Preview, “an experimental research model focusing on enhancing visual reasoning capabilities”.
My approach to running a link blog
I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” link where appropriate.
[... 1,510 words]Live blog: the 12th day of OpenAI—“Early evals for OpenAI o3”
It’s the final day of OpenAI’s 12 Days of OpenAI launch series, and since I built a live blogging system a couple of months ago I’ve decided to roll it out again to provide live commentary during the half hour event, which kicks off at 10am San Francisco time.
[... 76 words]December in LLMs has been a lot
I had big plans for December: for one thing, I was hoping to get to an actual RC of Datasette 1.0, in preparation for a full release in January. Instead, I’ve found myself distracted by a constant barrage of new LLM releases.
[... 901 words]Gemini 2.0 Flash “Thinking mode”
Those new model releases just keep on flowing. Today it’s Google’s snappily named gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp, their first entrant into the o1-style inference scaling class of models. I posted about a great essay about the significance of these just this morning.
Building Python tools with a one-shot prompt using uv run and Claude Projects
I’ve written a lot about how I’ve been using Claude to build one-shot HTML+JavaScript applications via Claude Artifacts. I recently started using a similar pattern to create one-shot Python utilities, using a custom Claude Project combined with the dependency management capabilities of uv.
[... 899 words]Gemini 2.0 Flash: An outstanding multi-modal LLM with a sci-fi streaming mode
Huge announcment from Google this morning: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era. There’s a ton of stuff in there (including updates on Project Astra and the new Project Mariner), but the most interesting pieces are the things we can start using today, built around the brand new Gemini 2.0 Flash model. The developer blog post has more of the technical details, and the Gemini 2.0 Cookbook is useful for understanding the API via Python code examples.
[... 1,740 words]ChatGPT Canvas can make API requests now, but it’s complicated
Today’s 12 Days of OpenAI release concerned ChatGPT Canvas, a new ChatGPT feature that enables ChatGPT to pop open a side panel with a shared editor in it where you can collaborate with ChatGPT on editing a document or writing code.
[... 1,116 words]I can now run a GPT-4 class model on my laptop
Meta’s new Llama 3.3 70B is a genuinely GPT-4 class Large Language Model that runs on my laptop.
[... 2,905 words]Prompts.js
I’ve been putting the new o1 model from OpenAI through its paces, in particular for code. I’m very impressed—it feels like it’s giving me a similar code quality to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, at least for Python and JavaScript and Bash... but it’s returning output noticeably faster.
[... 1,119 words]First impressions of the new Amazon Nova LLMs (via a new llm-bedrock plugin)
Amazon released three new Large Language Models yesterday at their AWS re:Invent conference. The new model family is called Amazon Nova and comes in three sizes: Micro, Lite and Pro.
[... 2,385 words]Storing times for human events
I’ve worked on various event websites in the past, and one of the unintuitively difficult problems that inevitably comes up is the best way to store the time that an event is happening. Based on that past experience, here’s my current recommendation.
[... 1,676 words]Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal
I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer.
[... 723 words]Weeknotes: asynchronous LLMs, synchronous embeddings, and I kind of started a podcast
These past few weeks I’ve been bringing Datasette and LLM together and distracting myself with a new sort-of-podcast crossed with a live streaming experiment.
[... 896 words]Notes from Bing Chat—Our First Encounter With Manipulative AI
I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people.
[... 438 words]Project: Civic Band—scraping and searching PDF meeting minutes from hundreds of municipalities
I interviewed Philip James about Civic Band, his “slowly growing collection of databases of the minutes from civic governments”. Philip demonstrated the site and talked through his pipeline for scraping and indexing meeting minutes from many different local government authorities around the USA.
[... 762 words]Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is an LLM that can code well that runs on my Mac
There’s a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba’s Qwen research team. On first impression it looks like the buzz is well deserved.
[... 697 words]Visualizing local election results with Datasette, Observable and MapLibre GL
Alex Garcia and myself hosted the first Datasette Open Office Hours on Friday—a live-streamed video session where we hacked on a project together and took questions and tips from community members on Discord.
[... 3,390 words]Project: VERDAD—tracking misinformation in radio broadcasts using Gemini 1.5
I’m starting a new interview series called Project. The idea is to interview people who are building interesting data projects and talk about what they’ve built, how they built it, and what they learned along the way.
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