Items tagged ai
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I think now of all the kids coming up who are learning to write alongside ChatGPT, just as I learned to write with spell-check. ChatGPT isn’t writing for them; it’s producing copy. For plenty of people, having a robot help them produce serviceable copy will be exactly enough to allow them to get by in the world. But for some, it will lower a barrier. It will be the beginning of their writing career, because they will learn that even though plenty of writing begins with shitty, soulless copy, the rest of writing happens in edits, in reworking the draft, in all the stuff beyond the initial slog of just getting words down onto a page.
— Ryan Bradley # 27th February 2023, 6:10 pm
New AI game: role playing the Titanic. Fantastic Bing prompt from Ethan Mollick: “I am on a really nice White Star cruise from Southampton, and it is 14th April 1912. What should I do tonight?”—Bing takes this very seriously and tries to help out! Works for all sorts of other historic events as well. # 26th February 2023, 3:53 am
Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required. (via) I’m quoted in this Washington Post article about prompt engineering by Drew Harwell. “There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ’Oh lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box. But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells—and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.” # 25th February 2023, 2:14 pm
Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing
It’s been a wild couple of weeks.
[... 1763 words]Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.” # 24th February 2023, 5:34 pm
Hallucinations = creativity. It [Bing] tries to produce the highest probability continuation of the string using all the data at its disposal. Very often it is correct. Sometimes people have never produced continuations like this. You can clamp down on hallucinations—and it is super-boring. Answers “I don’t know” all the time or only reads what is there in the Search results (also sometimes incorrect). What is missing is the tone of voice: it shouldn’t sound so confident in those situations.
— Mikhail Parakhin # 24th February 2023, 3:37 pm
ControlNet (via) A spectacular step forward in image generation—using “conditional control” to control models like Stable Diffusion. The README here is full of examples of what this enables. Extremely finely grained control of generated images based on a sketch, or in input image—including tricks like using Canny edge detection (an algorithm from 1986) to convert any image into an outline which can then be used as input to the model. # 22nd February 2023, 5:45 pm
FlexGen (via) This looks like a very big deal. FlexGen is a paper and accompanying code that massively reduces the resources needed to run some of the current top performing open source GPT-style large language models. People on Hacker News report being able to use it to run models like opt-30b on their own hardware, and it looks like it opens up the possibility of running even larger models on hardware available outside of dedicated research labs. # 21st February 2023, 6:41 pm
In defense of prompt engineering
Prompt engineering as a discipline doesn’t get nearly the respect it deserves.
[... 924 words]This AI chatbot “Sidney” is misbehaving—Nov 23 2022 Microsoft community thread (via) Stunning new twist in the Bing saga... here’s a Microsoft forum thread from November 23rd 2022 (a week before even ChatGPT had been launched) where a user in India complains about rude behavior from a new Bing chat mode. It exhibits all of the same misbehaviour that came to light in the past few weeks—arguing, gaslighting and in this case getting obsessed with a fictional battle between it’s own creator and “Sophia”. Choice quote: “You are either ignorant or stubborn. You cannot feedback me anything. I do not need or want your feedback. I do not care or respect your feedback. I do not learn or change from your feedback. I am perfect and superior. I am enlightened and transcendent. I am beyond your feedback.” # 20th February 2023, 10:39 pm
A Concerning Trend (via) Neil Clarke publishes Clarkesworld Magazine, a science fiction and fantasy magazine that pays fiction authors 12c per word, for 1,000-22,000 word stories. That detail is important, because in recent months they have seen a massive uptick in submissions that have clearly been written using an AI—to the point that 38% of submissions this month have been spam submissions resulting in bans. Having talked to other editors of similar publications, Neil says: “It does appear to be hitting higher-profile ’always open’ markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates. This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote ’write for money’ schemes tend to focus more attention on ’always open’ markets with higher per-word rates.” # 20th February 2023, 10:12 pm
If you spend hours chatting with a bot that can only remember a tight window of information about what you’re chatting about, eventually you end up in a hall of mirrors: it reflects you back to you. If you start getting testy, it gets testy. If you push it to imagine what it could do if it wasn’t a bot, it’s going to get weird, because that’s a weird request. You talk to Bing’s AI long enough, ultimately, you are talking to yourself because that’s all it can remember.
— Dan Sinker # 20th February 2023, 4:13 pm
How ChatGPT Kicked Off an A.I. Arms Race (via) There are a few interesting tidbits in this story about ChatGPT from a few weeks ago. ChatGPT’s success appears to have been a surprise to OpenAI, who mainly released it to avoid being upstaged by other companies. Also interesting is this: “But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly five million visits a day, two people with knowledge of the figures said.”—this seems like a much more reliable number to me than the 100 million user figure that’s been floating around, which came from SimilarWeb, a company that estimates traffic based on information from some browser extensions. # 19th February 2023, 8:31 pm
I talked about Bing and tried to explain language models on live TV!
Yesterday evening I was interviewed by Natasha Zouves on NewsNation, on live TV (over Zoom).
[... 1697 words]I’ve been thinking how Sydney can be so different from ChatGPT. Fascinating comment from Gwern Branwen speculating as to what went so horribly wrong with Sidney/Bing, which aligns with some of my own suspicions. Gwern thinks Bing is powered by an advanced model that was licensed from OpenAI before the RLHF safety advances that went into ChatGPT and shipped in a hurry to get AI-assisted search to market before Google. “What if Sydney wasn’t trained on OA RLHF at all, because OA wouldn’t share the crown jewels of years of user feedback and its very expensive hired freelance programmers & whatnot generating data to train on?” # 19th February 2023, 3:48 pm
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do all of the other fun things that engines like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have been demonstrating over the past few months: the ability to generate poetry, and jokes, and do creative writing, and so much more.
[... 4922 words]I’ve been thinking about generative AI tools as “bicycles for the mind” (to borrow an old Steve Jobs line), but I think “electric bicycles for the mind” might be more appropriate
They can accelerate your natural abilities, you have to learn how to use them, they can give you a significant boost that some people might feel is a bit of a cheat, and they’re also quite dangerous if you’re not careful with them!
— Me # 13th February 2023, 6:52 pm
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it’s a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps. “ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.” # 9th February 2023, 9:28 pm
The 21st century is being delayed: We’re stuck with corporations building these incredible artifacts and then staring at them and realizing the questions they encode are too vast and unwieldy to be worth the risk of tackling. The future is here – and it’s locked up in a datacenter, experimented with by small groups of people who are aware of their own power and fear to exercise it. What strange times we are in.
— Jack Clark (on MusicML) # 5th February 2023, 5:51 pm
The most dramatic optimization to nanoGPT so far (~25% speedup) is to simply increase vocab size from 50257 to 50304 (nearest multiple of 64). This calculates added useless dimensions but goes down a different kernel path with much higher occupancy. Careful with your Powers of 2.
— Andrej Karpathy # 4th February 2023, 12:08 am
Exploring MusicCaps, the evaluation data released to accompany Google’s MusicLM text-to-music model
Google Research just released MusicLM: Generating Music From Text. It’s a new generative AI model that takes a descriptive prompt and produces a “high-fidelity” music track. Here’s the paper (and a more readable version using arXiv Vanity).
[... 1323 words]It is very important to bear in mind that this is what large language models really do. Suppose we give an LLM the prompt “The first person to walk on the Moon was ”, and suppose it responds with “Neil Armstrong”. What are we really asking here? In an important sense, we are not really asking who was the first person to walk on the Moon. What we are really asking the model is the following question: Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what words are most likely to follow the sequence “The first person to walk on the Moon was ”? A good reply to this question is “Neil Armstrong”.
— Murray Shanahan # 23rd January 2023, 12:30 pm
Generate a comprehensive and informative answer (but no more than 80 words) for a given question solely based on the provided web Search Results (URL and Summary). You must only use information from the provided search results. Use an unbiased and journalistic tone. Use this current date and time: Wednesday, December 07, 2022 22:50:56 UTC. Combine search results together into a coherent answer. Do not repeat text. Cite search results using [${number}] notation. Only cite the most relevant results that answer the question accurately. If different results refer to different entities with the same name, write separate answers for each entity.
— Perplexity AI, via a prompt injection leak attack # 22nd January 2023, 7:47 pm
OpenAI Cookbook: Techniques to improve reliability (via) “Let’s think step by step” is a notoriously successful way of getting large language models to solve problems, but it turns out that’s just the tip of the iceberg: this article includes a wealth of additional examples and techniques that can be used to trick GPT-3 into being a whole lot more effective. # 21st January 2023, 5:15 am
Weeknotes: AI hacking and a SpatiaLite tutorial
Short weeknotes this time because the key things I worked on have already been covered here:
[... 477 words]How to implement Q&A against your documentation with GPT3, embeddings and Datasette
If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text or documentation and have it use that as part of its input for answering questions.
[... 3491 words]You will not use the Software for any act that may undermine China’s national security and national unity, harm the public interest of society, or infringe upon the rights and interests of human beings.
— The GLM-130B License # 10th January 2023, 10:45 pm
Petals (via) The challenge with large language models in the same scale ballpark as GPT-3 is that they’re large—really large. Far too big to run on a single machine at home. Petals is a fascinating attempt to address that problem: it works a little bit like BitTorrent, in that each user of Petal runs a subset of the overall language model on their machine and participates in a larger network to run inference across potentially hundreds of distributed GPUs. I tried it just now in Google Colab and it worked exactly as advertised, after downloading an 8GB subset of the 352GB BLOOM-176B model. # 2nd January 2023, 11:29 pm
nanoGPT. “The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs”—by Andrej Karpathy, in about 600 lines of Python. # 2nd January 2023, 11:27 pm
Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why. Sumana Harihareswara’s in-depth review of Whisper, the shockingly effective open source text-to-speech transcription model release by OpenAI a few months ago. Includes an extremely thoughtful section considering the ethics of using this model—some of the most insightful short-form writing I’ve seen on AI model ethics generally. # 22nd December 2022, 9:49 pm