Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in Jun, 2023

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


Weeknotes: symbex, LLM prompt templates, a bit of a break

I had a holiday to the UK for a family wedding anniversary and mostly took the time off... except for building symbex, which became one of those projects that kept on inspiring new features.

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Symbex: search Python code for functions and classes, then pipe them into a LLM

I just released a new Python CLI tool called Symbex. It’s a search tool, loosely inspired by ripgrep, which lets you search Python code for functions and classes by name or wildcard, then see just the source code of those matching entities.

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Understanding GPT tokenizers

Large language models such as GPT-3/4, LLaMA and PaLM work in terms of tokens. They take text, convert it into tokens (integers), then predict which tokens should come next.

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Weeknotes: Parquet in Datasette Lite, various talks, more LLM hacking

I’ve fallen a bit behind on my weeknotes. Here’s a catchup for the last few weeks.

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It’s infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input

One of the most common concerns I see about large language models regards their training data. People are worried that anything they say to ChatGPT could be memorized by it and spat out to other users. People are concerned that anything they store in a private repository on GitHub might be used as training data for future versions of Copilot.

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