Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Entries in Mar, 2023

Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2023 × Month: Mar × Sorted by date


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.

[... 3334 words]

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.

[... 1801 words]

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.

[... 1255 words]

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.

[... 1950 words]

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.

[... 1742 words]

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.

[... 1751 words]

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.

[... 2055 words]

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.

[... 1810 words]

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.

[... 1678 words]

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.

[... 1941 words]