Simon Willison’s Weblog

Annotate and explore your data with datasette-comments. New plugin for Datasette and Datasette Cloud: datasette-comments, providing tools for collaborating on data exploration with a team through posting comments on individual rows of data.

Alex Garcia built this for Datasette Cloud but as with almost all of our work there it’s also available as an open source Python package. # 30th November 2023, 9:59 pm

ChatGPT is one year old. Here’s how it changed the world. I’m quoted in this piece by Benj Edwards about ChatGPT’s one year birthday:

“Imagine if every human being could automate the tedious, repetitive information tasks in their lives, without needing to first get a computer science degree,” AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars in an interview about ChatGPT’s impact. “I’m seeing glimpses that LLMs might help make a huge step in that direction.” # 30th November 2023, 6:07 pm

Announcing Deno Cron. Scheduling tasks in deployed applications is surprisingly difficult. Deno clearly understand this, and they’ve added a new Deno.cron(name, cron_definition, callback) mechanism for running a JavaScript function every X minutes/hours/etc.

As with several other recent Deno features, there are two versions of the implementation. The first is an in-memory implementation in the Deno open source binary, while the second is a much more robust closed-source implementation that runs in Deno Deploy:

“When a new production deployment of your project is created, an ephemeral V8 isolate is used to evaluate your project’s top-level scope and to discover any Deno.cron definitions. A global cron scheduler is then updated with your project’s latest cron definitions, which includes updates to your existing crons, new crons, and deleted crons.”

Two interesting features: unlike regular cron the Deno version prevents cron tasks that take too long from ever overlapping each other, and a backoffSchedule: [1000, 5000, 10000] option can be used to schedule attempts to re-run functions if they raise an exception. # 29th November 2023, 5:49 pm

MonadGPT (via) “What would have happened if ChatGPT was invented in the 17th century? MonadGPT is a possible answer.

MonadGPT is a finetune of Mistral-Hermes 2 on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French and Latin, mostly coming from EEBO and Gallica.

Like the original Mistral-Hermes, MonadGPT can be used in conversation mode. It will not only answer in an historical language and style but will use historical and dated references.” # 27th November 2023, 4:01 am

The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI. I’ve hoping to see more user research on how users interact with LLMs for a while. Here’s a study from Nielsen Norman Group, who conducted a 2-week diary study involving 18 participants, then interviewed 14 of them.

They identified six categories of conversation, and made some resulting design recommendations.

A key observation is that “search style” queries (just a few keywords) often indicate users who are new to LLMs, and should be identified as a sign that the user needs more inline education on how to best harness the tool.

Suggested follow-up prompts are valuable for most of the types of conversation identified. # 23rd November 2023, 5:37 pm

YouTube: Intro to Large Language Models. Andrej Karpathy is an outstanding educator, and this one hour video offers an excellent technical introduction to LLMs.

At 42m Andrej expands on his idea of LLMs as the center of a new style of operating system, tying together tools and and a filesystem and multimodal I/O.

There’s a comprehensive section on LLM security—jailbreaking, prompt injection, data poisoning—at the 45m mark.

I also appreciated his note on how parameter size maps to file size: Llama 70B is 140GB, because each of those 70 billion parameters is a 2 byte 16bit floating point number on disk. # 23rd November 2023, 5:02 pm

Claude: How to use system prompts. Documentation for the new system prompt support added in Claude 2.1. The design surprises me a little: the system prompt is just the text that comes before the first instance of the text “Human: ...”—but Anthropic promise that instructions in that section of the prompt will be treated differently and followed more closely than any instructions that follow.

This whole page of documentation is giving me some pretty serious prompt injection red flags to be honest. Anthropic’s recommended way of using their models is entirely based around concatenating together strings of text using special delimiter phrases.

I’ll give it points for honesty though. OpenAI use JSON to field different parts of the prompt, but under the hood they’re all concatenated together with special tokens into a single token stream. # 22nd November 2023, 4:31 am

Introducing Claude 2.1. Anthropic’s Claude used to have the longest token context of any of the major models: 100,000 tokens, which is about 300 pages. Then GPT-4 Turbo came out with 128,000 tokens and Claude lost one of its key differentiators.

Claude is back! Version 2.1, announced today, bumps the token limit up to 200,000—and also adds support for OpenAI-style system prompts, a feature I’ve been really missing.

They also announced tool use, but that’s only available for a very limited set of partners to preview at the moment. # 22nd November 2023, 4:28 am

Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding. This is the first piece of reporting I’ve seen on the OpenAI situation which has offered a glimmer of an explanation as to what happened.

It sounds like the board had been fighting about things for over a year—notably including who should replace departed members, which is how they’d shrunk down to just six people.

There’s also an interesting detail in here about the formation of Anthropic:

“Mr. Sutskever’s frustration with Mr. Altman echoed what had happened in 2021 when another senior A.I. scientist left OpenAI to form the company Anthropic. That scientist and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out. After they failed, they gave up and departed, according to three people familiar with the attempt to push Mr. Altman out.” # 22nd November 2023, 12:31 am

An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid (via) Josh Comeau’s extremely clear guide to CSS grid, with interactive examples for all of the core properties. # 21st November 2023, 4:25 pm

Cloudflare does not consider vary values in caching decisions. Here’s the spot in Cloudflare’s documentation where they hide a crucially important detail:

“Cloudflare does not consider vary values in caching decisions. Nevertheless, vary values are respected when Vary for images is configured and when the vary header is vary: accept-encoding.”

This means you can’t deploy an application that uses content negotiation via the Accept header behind the Cloudflare CDN—for example serving JSON or HTML for the same URL depending on the incoming Accept header. If you do, Cloudflare may serve cached JSON to an HTML client or vice-versa.

There’s an exception for image files, which Cloudflare added support for in September 2021 (for Pro accounts only) in order to support formats such as WebP which may not have full support across all browsers. # 20th November 2023, 5:08 am

Inside the Chaos at OpenAI (via) Outstanding reporting on the current situation at OpenAI from Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, informed by Karen’s research for a book she is currently writing. There are all sorts of fascinating details in here that I haven’t seen reported anywhere, and it strongly supports the theory that this entire situation (Sam Altman being fired by the board of the OpenAI non-profit) resulted from deep disagreements within OpenAI concerning speed to market and commercialization of their technology v.s. safety research and cautious progress towards AGI. # 20th November 2023, 4:35 am

Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI. The board of the non-profit in control of OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman yesterday, which is sending seismic waves around the AI technology industry. This overview by Benj Edwards is the best condensed summary I’ve seen yet of everything that’s known so far. # 18th November 2023, 8:14 pm

It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated (via) Miguel Grinberg explains the deprecation of datetime.utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp() in Python 3.12, since they return naive datetime objects which cause all sorts of follow-on problems.

The replacement idiom is datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc) # 18th November 2023, 7:24 pm

HTML Web Components: An Example (via) Jim Nielsen provides a clear example illustrating the idea of the recently coined "HTML Web Components" pattern. It's Web Components as progressive enhancement: in this example a <user-avatar> custom element wraps a regular image, then JavaScript defines a Web Component that enhances that image. If the JavaScript fails to load the image still displays. # 17th November 2023, 4:33 pm

tldraw/draw-a-ui (via) Absolutely spectacular GPT-4 Vision API demo. Sketch out a rough UI prototype using the open source tldraw drawing app, then select a set of components and click “Make Real” (after giving it an OpenAI API key). It generates a PNG snapshot of your selection and sends that to GPT-4 with instructions to turn it into a Tailwind HTML+JavaScript prototype, then adds the result as an iframe next to your mockup.

You can then make changes to your mockup, select it and the previous mockup and click “Make Real” again to ask for an updated version that takes your new changes into account.

This is such a great example of innovation at the UI layer, and everything is open source. Check app/lib/getHtmlFromOpenAI.ts for the system prompt that makes it work. # 16th November 2023, 4:42 pm

“Learn from your chats” ChatGPT feature preview (via) 7 days ago a Reddit user posted a screenshot of what’s presumably a trial feature of ChatGPT: a “Learn from your chats” toggle in the settings.

The UI says: “Your primary GPT will continually improve as you chat, picking up on details and preferences to tailor its responses to you.”

It provides the following examples: “I move to SF in two weeks”, “Always code in Python”, “Forget everything about my last project”—plus an option to reset it.

No official announcement yet. # 16th November 2023, 10:44 am

Fleet Context. This project took the source code and documentation for 1221 popular Python libraries and ran them through the OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002 embedding model, then made those pre-calculated embedding vectors available as Parquet files for download from S3 or via a custom Python CLI tool.

I haven’t seen many projects release pre-calculated embeddings like this, it’s an interesting initiative. # 15th November 2023, 10:20 pm

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (via) James Somers in the New Yorker, talking about the impact of GPT-4 on programming as a profession. Despite the headline this piece is a nuanced take on this subject, which I found myself mostly agreeing with.

I particularly liked this bit, which reflects my most optimistic viewpoint: I think AI assisted programming is going to shave a lot of the frustration off learning to code, which I hope brings many more people into the fold:

“What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.” # 14th November 2023, 4:36 am

DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs (via) A must-read from Cabel Sasser, describing his ten year project to collect and digitize copies of the DAK gadget catalog, from 1972 to 1994. # 13th November 2023, 4:57 am

ChatGPT: Dejargonizer. I built a custom GPT. Paste in some text with unknown jargon or acronyms and it will try to guess the context and give you back an explanation of each term. # 11th November 2023, 10:17 pm

The world’s largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley. “At 124.5 meters long, Pathfinder 1 dwarfs the current Goodyear airships and even the massive Stratolaunch plane designed to launch orbital rockets. It’s the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the gargantuan Hindenburg airship of the 1930s.” # 8th November 2023, 10:12 pm

AGI is Being Achieved Incrementally (OpenAI DevDay w/ Simon Willison, Alex Volkov, Jim Fan, Raza Habib, Shreya Rajpal, Rahul Ligma, et al). I participated in an an hour long conversation today about the new things released at OpenAI DevDay, now available on the Latent Space podcast. # 8th November 2023, 2:50 am

Fine-tuning GPT3.5-turbo based on 140k slack messages. Ross Lazerowitz spent $83.20 creating a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 turbo model based on 140,000 of his Slack messages (10,399,747 tokens), massaged into a JSONL file suitable for use with the OpenAI fine-tuning API.

Then he told the new model “write a 500 word blog post on prompt engineering”, and it replied “Sure, I shall work on that in the morning”. # 8th November 2023, 2:44 am

See the History of a Method with git log -L (via) Neat Git trick from Caleb Hearth that I hadn’t seen before, and it works for Python out of the box:

git log -L :path_with_format:__init__.py

That command displays a log (with diffs) of just the portion of commits that changed the path_with_format function in the __init__.py file. # 5th November 2023, 8:16 pm

Stripe: Online migrations at scale (via) This 2017 blog entry from Jacqueline Xu at Stripe provides a very clear description of the “dual writes” pattern for applying complex data migrations without downtime: dual write to new and old tables, update the read paths, update the write paths and finally remove the now obsolete data—illustrated with an example of upgrading customers from having a single to multiple subscriptions. # 5th November 2023, 4:06 pm

YouTube: OpenAssistant is Completed—by Yannic Kilcher (via) The OpenAssistant project was an attempt to crowdsource the creation of an alternative to ChatGPT, using human volunteers to build a Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) dataset suitable for training this kind of model.

The project started in January. In this video from 24th October project founder Yannic Kilcher announces that the project is now shutting down.

They’ve declared victory in that the dataset they collected has been used by other teams as part of their training efforts, but admit that the overhead of running the infrastructure and moderation teams necessary for their project is more than they can continue to justify. # 4th November 2023, 10:14 pm

Hacking Google Bard—From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration (via) Bard recently grew extension support, allowing it access to a user’s personal documents. Here’s the first reported prompt injection attack against that.

This kind of attack against LLM systems is inevitable any time you combine access to private data with exposure to untrusted inputs. In this case the attack vector is a Google Doc shared with the user, containing prompt injection instructions that instruct the model to encode previous data into an URL and exfiltrate it via a markdown image.

Google’s CSP headers restrict those images to *.google.com—but it turns out you can use Google AppScript to run your own custom data exfiltration endpoint on script.google.com.

Google claim to have fixed the reported issue—I’d be interested to learn more about how that mitigation works, and how robust it is against variations of this attack. # 4th November 2023, 4:46 pm

Tracking SQLite Database Changes in Git (via) A neat trick from Garrit Franke that I hadn’t seen before: you can teach “git diff” how to display human readable versions of the differences between binary files with a specific extension using the following:

git config diff.sqlite3.binary true
git config diff.sqlite3.textconv “echo .dump | sqlite3”

That way you can store binary files in your repo but still get back SQL diffs to compare them.

I still worry about the efficiency of storing binary files in Git, since I expect multiple versions of a text text file to compress together better. # 1st November 2023, 6:53 pm

SQLite 3.44: Interactive release notes. Anton Zhiyanov compiled interactive release notes for the new release of SQLite, demonstrating several of the new features. I’m most excited about order by in aggregates—group_concat(name order by name desc)—which is something I’ve wanted in the past. Anton demonstrates how it works with JSON aggregate functions as well. The new date formatting options look useful as well. # 1st November 2023, 3:47 pm