Simon Willison’s Weblog

Engineering leaders, especially at large companies, are managing a team of a couple hundred people. That team might cost $50 to 100 million in salary a year. So as a CEO, when you hear from your eng leaders that ‘Engineering is an art, and you can’t predict how it’s going to work,’ it’s frustrating. They’re sitting there thinking, ‘They’re telling me this is art, but I’m spending $100 million on this art each year.’ That’s not reassuring.

— Will Larson # 31st May 2024, 7:53 pm

The realization hit me [when the GPT-3 paper came out] that an important property of the field flipped. In ~2011, progress in AI felt constrained primarily by algorithms. We needed better ideas, better modeling, better approaches to make further progress. If you offered me a 10X bigger computer, I’m not sure what I would have even used it for. GPT-3 paper showed that there was this thing that would just become better on a large variety of practical tasks, if you only trained a bigger one. Better algorithms become a bonus, not a necessity for progress in AGI. Possibly not forever and going forward, but at least locally and for the time being, in a very practical sense. Today, if you gave me a 10X bigger computer I would know exactly what to do with it, and then I’d ask for more.

— Andrej Karpathy # 30th May 2024, 7:27 am

In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products. [...] Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.

— Jeremy Keith # 29th May 2024, 11:06 am

Sometimes the most creativity is found in enumerating the solution space. Design is the process of prioritizing tradeoffs in a high dimensional space. Understand that dimensionality.

— Chris Perry # 29th May 2024, 7:17 am

I just left Google last month. The “AI Projects” I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this panic that as long as it had “AI” in it, it would be great. This myopia is NOT something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind.

The vision is that there will be a Tony Stark like Jarvis assistant in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard that you’ll never leave. That vision is pure catnip. The fear is that they can’t afford to let someone else get there first.

— Scott Jenson # 24th May 2024, 6:33 am

The leader of a team—especially a senior one—is rarely ever the smartest, the most expert or even the most experienced.

Often it’s the person who can best understand individuals’ motivations and galvanize them towards an outcome, all while helping them stay cohesive.

— Nivia Henry # 24th May 2024, 6:09 am

But increasingly, I’m worried that attempts to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry — scummy though it may be — may result in overall weakening of financial privacy, and may hurt vulnerable people the most. As they say, “hard cases make bad law”.

— Molly White # 24th May 2024, 1:19 am

The most effective mechanism I’ve found for rolling out No Wrong Door is initiating three-way conversations when asked questions. If someone direct messages me a question, then I will start a thread with the question asker, myself, and the person I believe is the correct recipient for the question. This is particularly effective because it’s a viral approach: rolling out No Wrong Door just requires any one of the three participants to adopt the approach.

— Will Larson # 23rd May 2024, 2:48 pm

The default prefix used to be “sqlite_”. But then Mcafee started using SQLite in their anti-virus product and it started putting files with the “sqlite” name in the c:/temp folder. This annoyed many windows users. Those users would then do a Google search for “sqlite”, find the telephone numbers of the developers and call to wake them up at night and complain. For this reason, the default name prefix is changed to be “sqlite” spelled backwards.

— D. Richard Hipp, 18 years ago # 22nd May 2024, 4:21 am

Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system. He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people. After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer.

— Scarlett Johansson # 20th May 2024, 11:16 pm

I rewrote it [the Oracle of Bacon] in Rust in January 2023 when I switched over to TMDB as a data source. The new data source was a deep change, and I didn’t want the headache of building it in the original 1990s-era C codebase.

— Patrick Reynolds # 18th May 2024, 1:56 am

I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars.

— Kelsey Piper # 17th May 2024, 7:11 pm

[...] by default Heroku will spin up multiple dynos in different availability zones. It also has multiple routers in different zones so if one zone should go completely offline, having a second dyno will mean that your app can still serve traffic.

— Richard Schneeman # 16th May 2024, 5:44 am

But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

— Casey Newton # 15th May 2024, 10:23 pm

If we want LLMs to be less hype and more of a building block for creating useful everyday tools for people, AI companies’ shift away from scaling and AGI dreams to acting like regular product companies that focus on cost and customer value proposition is a welcome development.

— Arvind Narayanan # 15th May 2024, 4:25 pm

But unlike the phone system, we can’t separate an LLM’s data from its commands. One of the enormously powerful features of an LLM is that the data affects the code. We want the system to modify its operation when it gets new training data. We want it to change the way it works based on the commands we give it. The fact that LLMs self-modify based on their input data is a feature, not a bug. And it’s the very thing that enables prompt injection.

— Bruce Schneier # 15th May 2024, 1:34 pm

The MacBook Airs are Apple’s best-selling laptops; the iPad Pros are Apple’s least-selling iPads. I think it’s as simple as this: the current MacBook Airs have the M3, not the M4, because there isn’t yet sufficient supply of M4 chips to satisfy demand for MacBook Airs.

— John Gruber # 15th May 2024, 3:26 am

I’m no developer, but I got the AI part working in about an hour.

What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting up the templating, routes and data architecture.

It reminded me that, in order to capitalise on the potential of AI technologies, we need to really invest in the other stuff too, especially data infrastructure.

It would be ironic, and a huge shame, if AI hype sucked all the investment out of those things.

— Tim Paul # 13th May 2024, 2:35 pm

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

— Nathaniel Borenstein # 8th May 2024, 8:24 pm

Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content

— @deepfates # 7th May 2024, 3:59 pm

Migrations are not something you can do rarely, or put off, or avoid; not if you are a growing company. Migrations are an ordinary fact of life.

Doing them swiftly, efficiently, and -- most of all -- *completely* is one of the most critical skills you can develop as a team.

— Charity Majors # 6th May 2024, 1:52 pm

I believe these things:
1. If you use generative tools to produce or modify your images, you have abandoned photointegrity.
2. That’s not always wrong. Sometimes you need an image of a space battle or a Triceratops family or whatever.
3. What is always wrong is using this stuff without disclosing it.

— Tim Bray # 4th May 2024, 4:26 pm

I used to have this singular focus on students writing code that they submit, and then I run test cases on the code to determine what their grade is. This is such a narrow view of what it means to be a software engineer, and I just felt that with generative AI, I’ve managed to overcome that restrictive view.

It’s an opportunity for me to assess their learning process of the whole software development [life cycle]—not just code. And I feel like my courses have opened up more and they’re much broader than they used to be. I can make students work on larger and more advanced projects.

— Daniel Zingaro # 3rd May 2024, 6:17 pm

AI is the most anthropomorphized technology in history, starting with the name—intelligence—and plenty of other words thrown around the field: learning, neural, vision, attention, bias, hallucination. These references only make sense to us because they are hallmarks of being human. [...]

There is something kind of pathological going on here. One of the most exciting advances in computer science ever achieved, with so many promising uses, and we can’t think beyond the most obvious, least useful application? What, because we want to see ourselves in this technology? [...]

Anthropomorphizing AI not only misleads, but suggests we are on equal footing with, even subservient to, this technology, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

— Zach Seward # 2nd May 2024, 7:44 pm

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

— Tom Eastman # 2nd May 2024, 2:40 am

If I were an AI sommelier I would say that gpt-3.5-turbo is smooth and agreeable with a long finish, though perhaps lacking depth. text-davinci-003 is spicy and tight, sophisticated even.

— Matt Webb # 31st May 2023, 2:52 pm

A whole new paradigm would be needed to solve prompt injections 10/10 times – It may well be that LLMs can never be used for certain purposes. We’re working on some new approaches, and it looks like synthetic data will be a key element in preventing prompt injections.

— Sam Altman, via Marvin von Hagen # 25th May 2023, 11:03 pm

In general my approach to running arbitrary untrusted code is 20% sandboxing and 80% making sure that it’s an extremely low value attack target so it’s not worth trying to break in.

Programs are terminated after 1 second of runtime, they run in a container with no network access, and the machine they’re running on has no sensitive data on it and a very small CPU.

— Julia Evans # 25th May 2023, 8:12 pm

The benefit of ground effects are:—10-20% range extension (agreed, between 50% and 100% wingspan, which is where seagliders fly, the aerodynamic benefit of ground effect is reduced compared to near surface flight)—Drastic reduction in reserve fuel. This is a key limitation of electric aircraft because they need to sustain powered flight to another airport in the event of an emergency. We can always land on the water, therefore, we can count all of our batteries towards “mission useable” [...] Very difficult to distribute propulsion with IC engines or mechanical linkages. Electric propulsion technology unlocks the blown wing, which unlocks the use of hydrofoils, which unlocks wave tolerance and therefore operations of WIGs, which unlocks longer range of electric flight. It all works together.

— Billy Thalheimer, founder of REGENT # 24th May 2023, 2:58 am

I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a “singularity” in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same.

— Donald Knuth # 20th May 2023, 4:51 pm