Simon Willison’s Weblog

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide (via) Ethan Mollick’s guide to practical usage of large language model chatbot like ChatGPT 3.5 and 4, Bing, Claude and Bard is the best I’ve seen so far. He includes useful warnings about common traps and things that these models are both useful for and useless at. # 31st March 2023, 6:17 am

Downloading and converting the original models (Cerebras-GPT) (via) Georgi Gerganov added support for the Apache 2 licensed Cerebras-GPT language model to his ggml C++ inference library, as used by llama.cpp. # 31st March 2023, 4:28 am

Schillace Laws of Semantic AI (via) Principles for prompt engineering against large language models, developed by Microsoft’s Sam Schillace. # 30th March 2023, 12:20 am

Making SQLite extensions npm install’able for Node.js, and on deno.land/x for Deno (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to get his “pip install X” trick for distributing compiled SQLite extensions to work for Node too! Now you can “npm install” 10 of his extensions, including sqlite-regex and sqlite-xsv and sqlite-http and sqlite-html and more, and attach them to a node-sqlite3 or better-sqlite3 connection. He’s bundled them for Deno too! # 29th March 2023, 10:13 pm

gpt4all. Similar to Alpaca, here’s a project which takes the LLaMA base model and fine-tunes it on instruction examples generated by GPT-3—in this case, it’s 800,000 examples generated using the ChatGPT GPT 3.5 turbo model (Alpaca used 52,000 generated by regular GPT-3). This is currently the easiest way to get a LLaMA derived chatbot running on your own computer: the repo includes compiled binaries for running on M1/M2, Intel Mac, Windows and Linux and provides a link to download the 3.9GB 4-bit quantized model. # 29th March 2023, 6:03 pm

Quicker serverless Postgres connections. Neon provide “serverless PostgreSQL”—autoscaling, managed PostgreSQL optimized for use with serverless hosting environments. A neat capability they provide is the ability to connect to a PostgreSQL server via WebSockets, which means their database can be used from environments such as Cloudflare workers which don’t have the ability to use a standard TCP database connection. This article describes some clever tricks they used to make establishing new connections via WebSockets more efficient, using the least possible number of network round-trips. # 28th March 2023, 10:09 pm

Cerebras-GPT: A Family of Open, Compute-efficient, Large Language Models (via) The latest example of an open source large language model you can run your own hardware. This one is particularly interesting because the entire thing is under the Apache 2 license. Cerebras are an AI hardware company offering a product with 850,000 cores—this release was trained on their hardware, presumably to demonstrate its capabilities. The model comes in seven sizes from 111 million to 13 billion parameters, and the smaller sizes can be tried directly on Hugging Face. # 28th March 2023, 10:05 pm

Announcing Open Flamingo (via) New from LAION: “OpenFlamingo is a framework that enables training and evaluation of large multimodal models (LMMs)”. Multimodal here means it can answer questions about images—their interactive demo includes tools for image captioning, animal recognition, counting objects and visual question answering. Theye’ve released the OpenFlamingo-9B model built on top of LLaMA 7B and CLIP ViT/L-14—the model checkpoint is a 5.24 GB download from Hugging Face, and is available under a non-commercial research license. # 28th March 2023, 9:59 pm

LLaMA voice chat, with Whisper and Siri TTS. llama.cpp author Georgi Gerganov has stitched together the LLaMA language model, the Whisper voice to text model (with his whisper.cpp library) and the macOS “say” command to create an entirely offline AI agent that he can talk to with his voice and that can speak replies straight back to him. # 27th March 2023, 9:06 pm

Simple Push Demo (via) Safari 16.4 is out (upgrade to iOS 16.4 to get it) and the biggest feature for me is mobile support for Web Push notifications. This little demo tool was the first I found that successfully sent a notification to my phone: frustratingly you have to add it to your home page first in order to enable the feature. The site also provides a curl command for sending push notifications through the Apple push server once a token has been registered, which is the crucial step to figuring out how to build applications that can send out notifications to users who have registered to receive them. # 27th March 2023, 8:48 pm

I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night. A poster on r/blender describes how their job creating graphics for mobile games has switched from creating 3D models for rendering 2D art to prompting Midjourney v5 and cleaning up the results in Photoshop. “I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. [...] I always was very sure I wouldn’t lose my job, because I produce slightly better quality. This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.” # 27th March 2023, 3:17 am

Leicester balloon riot (via) In 1864 a test flight of a new hydrogen balloon in Leicester’s Victoria Park attracted 50,000 spectators, and ended in a riot that destroyed the balloon. “Early in the afternoon there was a disturbance when a gentleman, claiming to be an aeronaut, announced that Britannia was not Coxwell’s newest and biggest balloon but an older model. This enraged the crowd who, shortly after 2pm, broke down the barrier and demanded that Coxwell take off immediately.” # 26th March 2023, 6:29 pm

scrapeghost (via) Scraping is a really interesting application for large language model tools like GPT3. James Turk’s scrapeghost is a very neatly designed entrant into this space—it’s a Python library and CLI tool that can be pointed at any URL and given a roughly defined schema (using a neat mini schema language) which will then use GPT3 to scrape the page and try to return the results in the supplied format. # 26th March 2023, 5:29 am

Hello Dolly: Democratizing the magic of ChatGPT with open models. A team at DataBricks applied the same fine-tuning data used by Stanford Alpaca against LLaMA to a much older model—EleutherAI’s GPT-J 6B, first released in May 2021. As with Alpaca, they found that instruction tuning took the raw model—which was extremely difficult to interact with—and turned it into something that felt a lot more like ChatGPT. It’s a shame they reused the license-encumbered 52,000 training samples from Alpaca, but I doubt it will be long before someone recreates a freely licensed alternative to that training set. # 24th March 2023, 5:05 pm

textra (via) Tiny (432KB) macOS binary CLI tool by Dylan Freedman which produces high quality text extraction from PDFs, images and even audio files using the VisionKit APIs in macOS 13 and higher. It handles handwriting too! # 23rd March 2023, 9:08 pm

ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin. “The ChatGPT Retrieval Plugin repository provides a flexible solution for semantic search and retrieval of personal or organizational documents using natural language queries.” How many existing startups were building this I wonder? # 23rd March 2023, 8:58 pm

ChatGPT plugins. ChatGPT is getting a plugins mechanism, which will allow developers to provide extra capabilities to ChatGPT, like looking up restaurants on OpenTable or fetching data from APIs. This feels like the kind of feature that could obsolete—or launch—a thousand startups. It also makes ChatGPT much more interesting as a general purpose tool, as opposed to something that only works as an interface to a language model. # 23rd March 2023, 8:56 pm

mitsua-diffusion-one (via) “Mitsua Diffusion One is a latent text-to-image diffusion model, which is a successor of Mitsua Diffusion CC0. This model is trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 or copyright images with permission for use.” I’ve been talking about how much I’d like to try out a “vegan” AI model trained entirely on out-of-copyright images for ages, and here one is! It looks like the training data mainly came from CC0 art gallery collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access. # 23rd March 2023, 2:56 pm

Teaching News Apps with Codespaces (via) Derek Willis used GitHub Codespaces for the latest data journalism class he taught, and it eliminated the painful process of trying to get students on an assortment of Mac, Windows and Chromebook laptops all to a point where they could start working and learning together. # 23rd March 2023, 12:39 am