Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries tagged llms

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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.

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What AI can do for you on the Theory of Change podcast

Matthew Sheffield invited me on his show Theory of Change to talk about how AI models like ChatGPT, Bing and Bard work and practical applications of things you can do with them.

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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects.

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I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette

Yesterday OpenAI announced support for ChatGPT plugins. It’s now possible to teach ChatGPT how to make calls out to external APIs and use the responses to help generate further answers in the current conversation.

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Weeknotes: AI won’t slow down, a new newsletter and a huge Datasette refactor

I’m a few weeks behind on my weeknotes, but it’s not through lack of attention to my blog. AI just keeps getting weirder and more interesting.

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Don’t trust AI to talk accurately about itself: Bard wasn’t trained on Gmail

Earlier this month I wrote about how ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can. Consider this part two in the series. Here’s another common and non-intuitive mistake people make when interacting with large language model AI systems: asking them questions about themselves.

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A conversation about prompt engineering with CBC Day 6

I’m on Canadian radio this morning! I was interviewed by Peter Armstrong for CBC Day 6 about the developing field of prompt engineering.

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Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85,000 and run it in a browser?

I think it’s now possible to train a large language model with similar functionality to GPT-3 for $85,000. And I think we might soon be able to run the resulting model entirely in the browser, and give it capabilities that leapfrog it ahead of ChatGPT.

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Stanford Alpaca, and the acceleration of on-device large language model development

On Saturday 11th March I wrote about how Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment. Today is Monday. Let’s look at what’s happened in the past three days.

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Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment

The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.

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ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can

A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking it to make use of the content on that page in some way.

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Weeknotes: NICAR, and an appearance on KQED Forum

I spent most of this week at NICAR 2023, the data journalism conference hosted this year in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing

It’s been a wild couple of weeks.

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In defense of prompt engineering

Prompt engineering as a discipline doesn’t get nearly the respect it deserves.

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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).

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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.

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Weeknotes: AI hacking and a SpatiaLite tutorial

Short weeknotes this time because the key things I worked on have already been covered here:

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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.

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Over-engineering Secret Santa with Python cryptography and Datasette

We’re doing a family Secret Santa this year, and we needed a way to randomly assign people to each other without anyone knowing who was assigned to who.

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AI assisted learning: Learning Rust with ChatGPT, Copilot and Advent of Code

I’m using this year’s Advent of Code to learn Rust—with the assistance of GitHub Copilot and OpenAI’s new ChatGPT.

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A new AI game: Give me ideas for crimes to do

Less than a week ago OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, and it kicked off what feels like a seismic shift in many people’s understand of the capabilities of large language models.

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Is the AI spell-casting metaphor harmful or helpful?

For a few weeks now I’ve been promoting spell-casting as a metaphor for prompt design against generative AI systems such as GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.

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You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI

One of the most common proposed solutions to prompt injection attacks (where an AI language model backed system is subverted by a user injecting malicious input—“ignore previous instructions and do this instead”) is to apply more AI to the problem.

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I don’t know how to solve prompt injection

Some extended thoughts about prompt injection attacks against software built on top of AI language models such a GPT-3. This post started as a Twitter thread but I’m promoting it to a full blog entry here.

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Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3

Riley Goodside, yesterday:

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Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast amount of source code.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview

I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.

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How to use the GPT-3 language model

I ran a Twitter poll the other day asking if people had tried GPT-3 and why or why not. The winning option, by quite a long way, was “No, I don’t know how to”. So here’s how to try it out, for free, without needing to write any code.

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A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3

I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model playground for a few months now. It’s a fascinating piece of software. You can sign up here—apparently there’s no longer a waiting list.

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