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Large Language Models can run tools in your terminal with LLM 0.26

Visit Large Language Models can run tools in your terminal with LLM 0.26

LLM 0.26 is out with the biggest new feature since I started the project: support for tools. You can now use the LLM CLI tool—and Python library—to grant LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and local models from Ollama with access to any tool that you can represent as a Python function.

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Trying out llama.cpp’s new vision support

Visit Trying out llama.cpp's new vision support

This llama.cpp server vision support via libmtmd pull request—via Hacker News—was merged earlier today. The PR finally adds full support for vision models to the excellent llama.cpp project. It’s documented on this page, but the more detailed technical details are covered here. Here are my notes on getting it working on a Mac.

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Feed a video to a vision LLM as a sequence of JPEG frames on the CLI (also LLM 0.25)

Visit Feed a video to a vision LLM as a sequence of JPEG frames on the CLI (also LLM 0.25)

The new llm-video-frames plugin can turn a video file into a sequence of JPEG frames and feed them directly into a long context vision LLM such as GPT-4.1, even when that LLM doesn’t directly support video input. It depends on a plugin feature I added to LLM 0.25, which I released last night.

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Long context support in LLM 0.24 using fragments and template plugins

Visit Long context support in LLM 0.24 using fragments and template plugins

LLM 0.24 is now available with new features to help take advantage of the increasingly long input context supported by modern LLMs.

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Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection

Visit Adding AI-generated descriptions to my tools collection

The /colophon page on my tools.simonwillison.net site lists all 78 of the HTML+JavaScript tools I’ve built (with AI assistance) along with their commit histories, including links to prompting transcripts. I wrote about how I built that colophon the other day. It now also includes a description of each tool, generated using Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

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Structured data extraction from unstructured content using LLM schemas

Visit Structured data extraction from unstructured content using LLM schemas

LLM 0.23 is out today, and the signature feature is support for schemas—a new way of providing structured output from a model that matches a specification provided by the user. I’ve also upgraded both the llm-anthropic and llm-gemini plugins to add support for schemas.

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Claude 3.7 Sonnet, extended thinking and long output, llm-anthropic 0.14

Visit Claude 3.7 Sonnet, extended thinking and long output, llm-anthropic 0.14

Claude 3.7 Sonnet (previously) is a very interesting new model. I released llm-anthropic 0.14 last night adding support for the new model’s features to LLM. I learned a whole lot about the new model in the process of building that plugin.

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LLM 0.22, the annotated release notes

I released LLM 0.22 this evening. Here are the annotated release notes:

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Run LLMs on macOS using llm-mlx and Apple’s MLX framework

Visit Run LLMs on macOS using llm-mlx and Apple's MLX framework

llm-mlx is a brand new plugin for my LLM Python Library and CLI utility which builds on top of Apple’s excellent MLX array framework library and mlx-lm package. If you’re a terminal user or Python developer with a Mac this may be the new easiest way to start exploring local Large Language Models.

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Using pip to install a Large Language Model that’s under 100MB

Visit Using pip to install a Large Language Model that's under 100MB

I just released llm-smollm2, a new plugin for LLM that bundles a quantized copy of the SmolLM2-135M-Instruct LLM inside of the Python package.

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OpenAI o3-mini, now available in LLM

OpenAI’s o3-mini is out today. As with other o-series models it’s a slightly difficult one to evaluate—we now need to decide if a prompt is best run using GPT-4o, o1, o3-mini or (if we have access) o1 Pro.

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Prompts.js

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I’ve been putting the new o1 model from OpenAI through its paces, in particular for code. I’m very impressed—it feels like it’s giving me a similar code quality to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, at least for Python and JavaScript and Bash... but it’s returning output noticeably faster.

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First impressions of the new Amazon Nova LLMs (via a new llm-bedrock plugin)

Visit First impressions of the new Amazon Nova LLMs (via a new llm-bedrock plugin)

Amazon released three new Large Language Models yesterday at their AWS re:Invent conference. The new model family is called Amazon Nova and comes in three sizes: Micro, Lite and Pro.

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Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal

Visit Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal

I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer.

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Weeknotes: asynchronous LLMs, synchronous embeddings, and I kind of started a podcast

These past few weeks I’ve been bringing Datasette and LLM together and distracting myself with a new sort-of-podcast crossed with a live streaming experiment.

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You can now run prompts against images, audio and video in your terminal using LLM

Visit You can now run prompts against images, audio and video in your terminal using LLM

I released LLM 0.17 last night, the latest version of my combined CLI tool and Python library for interacting with hundreds of different Large Language Models such as GPT-4o, Llama, Claude and Gemini.

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Run a prompt to generate and execute jq programs using llm-jq

Visit Run a prompt to generate and execute jq programs using llm-jq

llm-jq is a brand new plugin for LLM which lets you pipe JSON directly into the llm jq command along with a human-language description of how you’d like to manipulate that JSON and have a jq program generated and executed for you on the fly.

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Datasette 1.0a14: The annotated release notes

Visit Datasette 1.0a14: The annotated release notes

Released today: Datasette 1.0a14. This alpha includes significant contributions from Alex Garcia, including some backwards-incompatible changes in the run-up to the 1.0 release.

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Weeknotes: GPT-4o mini, LLM 0.15, sqlite-utils 3.37 and building a staging environment

Upgrades to LLM to support the latest models, and a whole bunch of invisible work building out a staging environment for Datasette Cloud.

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Language models on the command-line

Visit Language models on the command-line

I gave a talk about accessing Large Language Models from the command-line last week as part of the Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists six week long online conference. The talk focused on my LLM Python command-line utility and ways you can use it (and its plugins) to explore LLMs and use them for useful tasks.

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Weeknotes: PyCon US 2024

Earlier this month I attended PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I gave an invited keynote on the Saturday morning titled “Imitation intelligence”, tying together much of what I’ve learned about Large Language Models over the past couple of years and making the case that the Python community has a unique opportunity and responsibility to help try to nudge this technology in a positive direction.

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Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets

Visit Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets

Llama 3 landed on Thursday. I ended up updating a whole bunch of different plugins to work with it, described in Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM.

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Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM

Visit Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM

Llama 3 was released on Thursday. Early indications are that it’s now the best available openly licensed model—Llama 3 70b Instruct has taken joint 5th place on the LMSYS arena leaderboard, behind only Claude 3 Opus and some GPT-4s and sharing 5th place with Gemini Pro and Claude 3 Sonnet. But unlike those other models Llama 3 70b is weights available and can even be run on a (high end) laptop!

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AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

Visit AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.

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Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus

Visit Building files-to-prompt entirely using Claude 3 Opus

files-to-prompt is a new tool I built to help me pipe several files at once into prompts to LLMs such as Claude and GPT-4.

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llm cmd undo last git commit—a new plugin for LLM

Visit llm cmd undo last git commit - a new plugin for LLM

I just released a neat new plugin for my LLM command-line tool: llm-cmd. It lets you run a command to to generate a further terminal command, review and edit that command, then hit <enter> to execute it or <ctrl-c> to cancel.

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Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins

I wrote extensive annotated release notes for Datasette 1.0a8 and LLM 0.13 already. Here’s what else I’ve been up to this past three weeks.

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LLM 0.13: The annotated release notes

I just released LLM 0.13, the latest version of my LLM command-line tool for working with Large Language Models—both via APIs and running models locally using plugins.

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Many options for running Mistral models in your terminal using LLM

Visit Many options for running Mistral models in your terminal using LLM

Mistral AI is the most exciting AI research lab at the moment. They’ve now released two extremely powerful smaller Large Language Models under an Apache 2 license, and have a third much larger one that’s available via their API.

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ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI

I attended OpenAI DevDay today, the first OpenAI developer conference. It was a lot. They released a bewildering array of new API tools, which I’m just beginning to wade my way through fully understanding.

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