Simon Willison’s Weblog

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

Study claims ChatGPT is losing capability, but some experts aren’t convinced. Benj Edwards talks about the ongoing debate as to whether or not GPT-4 is getting weaker over time. I remain skeptical of those claims—I think it’s more likely that people are seeing more of the flaws now that the novelty has worn off.

I’m quoted in this piece: “Honestly, the lack of release notes and transparency may be the biggest story here. How are we meant to build dependable software on top of a platform that changes in completely undocumented and mysterious ways every few months?” # 20th July 2023, 12:22 am

OpenAI: Function calling and other API updates. Huge set of announcements from OpenAI today. A bunch of price reductions, but the things that most excite me are the new gpt-3.5-turbo-16k model which offers a 16,000 token context limit (4x the existing 3.5 turbo model) at a price of $0.003 per 1K input tokens and $0.004 per 1K output tokens—1/10th the price of GPT-4 8k.

The other big new feature: functions! You can now send JSON schema defining one or more functions to GPT 3.5 and GPT-4—those models will then return a blob of JSON describing a function they want you to call (if they determine that one should be called). Your code executes the function and passes the results back to the model to continue the execution flow.

This is effectively an implementation of the ReAct pattern, with models that have been fine-tuned to execute it.

They acknowledge the risk of prompt injection (though not by name) in the post: “We are working to mitigate these and other risks. Developers can protect their applications by only consuming information from trusted tools and by including user confirmation steps before performing actions with real-world impact, such as sending an email, posting online, or making a purchase.” # 13th June 2023, 5:34 pm

Examples of weird GPT-4 behavior for the string “ davidjl”. GPT-4, when told to repeat or otherwise process the string “ davidjl” (note the leading space character), treats it as “jndl” or “jspb” or “JDL” instead. It turns out “ davidjl” has its own single token in the tokenizer: token ID 23282, presumably dating back to the GPT-2 days.

Riley Goodside refers to these as “glitch tokens”.

This token might refer to Reddit user davidjl123 who ranks top of the league for the old /r/counting subreddit, with 163,477 posts there which presumably ended up in older training data. # 8th June 2023, 9:29 am

Language models can explain neurons in language models (via) Fascinating interactive paper by OpenAI, describing how they used GPT-4 to analyze the concepts tracked by individual neurons in their much older GPT-2 model. “We generated cluster labels by embedding each neuron explanation using the OpenAI Embeddings API, then clustering them and asking GPT-4 to label each cluster.” # 9th May 2023, 5:35 pm

Closed AI Models Make Bad Baselines (via) The NLP academic research community are facing a tough challenge: the state-of-the-art in large language models, GPT-4, is entirely closed which means papers that compare it to other models lack replicability and credibility. “We make the case that as far as research and scientific publications are concerned, the “closed” models (as defined below) cannot be meaningfully studied, and they should not become a “universal baseline”, the way BERT was for some time widely considered to be.”

Anna Rogers proposes a new rule for this kind of research: “That which is not open and reasonably reproducible cannot be considered a requisite baseline.” # 3rd April 2023, 7:57 pm

GPT-4 Developer Livestream. 25 minutes of live demos from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman at the GPT-4 launch. These demos are all fascinating, including code writing and multimodal vision inputs. The one that really struck me is when Greg pasted in a copy of the tax code and asked GPT-4 to answer some sophisticated tax questions, involving step-by-step calculations that cited parts of the tax code it was working with. # 15th March 2023, 12:20 am

GPT-4 Technical Report (PDF). 98 pages of much more detailed information about GPT-4. The appendices are particularly interesting, including examples of advanced prompt engineering as well as examples of harmful outputs before and after tuning attempts to try and suppress them. # 14th March 2023, 9:39 pm