Simon Willison’s Weblog

You’ll often find prompt engineers come from a history, philosophy, or English language background, because it’s wordplay. You’re trying to distill the essence or meaning of something into a limited number of words.

— Albert Phelps # 31st March 2023, 5:54 pm

I would say ChatGPT (mostly the new GPT-4 model), with a lot of hand-holding and cajoling from me, wrote 60-70% of the code (PHP, Javascript, CSS, SQL) for this AMA site. And we easily did it in a third of the time it would have taken me by myself, without having to look something up on Stack Overflow every four minutes or endlessly consulting CSS and PHP reference guides or tediously writing tests, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I never would have even embarked on building this little site-let had ChatGPT not existed...I would have done something much simpler and more manual instead. And it was a *blast*. I had so much fun and learned so much along the way.

— Jason Kottke # 28th March 2023, 10:36 pm

By gaining mastery of language, A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization, from bank vaults to holy sepulchers.

What would it mean for humans to live in a world where a large percentage of stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by nonhuman intelligence, which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses, biases and addictions of the human mind — while knowing how to form intimate relationships with human beings?

— Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin # 28th March 2023, 7:09 pm

Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste. Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt. This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation.

— Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin # 27th March 2023, 5:14 pm

I think it’s likely that soon all computer users will have the ability to develop small software tools from scratch, and to describe modifications they’d like made to software they’re already using.

— Geoffrey Litt # 27th March 2023, 6:10 am

After three decades of working with software, I’m also seeing myself learning faster using ChatGPT. So apparently it works even for us more seasoned programmers.

— Salvatore Sanfilippo # 26th March 2023, 2:55 pm

SvelteKit is written in JS and distributed as source code — no build step — and it’s been miraculous for productivity. build steps make sense for apps, they make much less sense for libraries

— Rich Harris # 24th March 2023, 11:07 pm

If you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.

— James Vincent # 23rd March 2023, 12:10 am

GPT-4, like GPT-3 before it, has a capability overhang; at the time of release, neither OpenAI or its various deployment partners have a clue as to the true extent of GPT-4’s capability surface—that’s something that we’ll get to collectively discover in the coming years. This also means we don’t know the full extent of plausible misuses or harms.

— Jack Clark # 22nd March 2023, 12:40 am

Here are some absurdly expensive things you can do on a trip to Tokyo: Buy a golden toilet. There is a toilet in Tokyo that is made of gold and costs around 10 million yen. If you are looking for a truly absurd experience, you can buy this toilet and use it for your next bowel movement. [...]

— Google Bard # 21st March 2023, 6:27 pm

Was on a plane yesterday, studying some physics; got confused about something and I was able to solve my problem by just asking alpaca-13B—running locally on my machine—for an explanation. Felt straight-up spooky.

— Andy Matuschak # 21st March 2023, 2:45 pm

As an NLP researcher I’m kind of worried about this field after 10-20 years. Feels like these oversized LLMs are going to eat up this field and I’m sitting in my chair thinking, “What’s the point of my research when GPT-4 can do it better?”

— Jeonghwan Kim # 16th March 2023, 5:39 am

I expect GPT-4 will have a LOT of applications in web scraping

The increased 32,000 token limit will be large enough to send it the full DOM of most pages, serialized to HTML—then ask questions to extract data

Or... take a screenshot and use the GPT4 image input mode to ask questions about the visually rendered page instead!

Might need to dust off all of those old semantic web dreams, because the world’s information is rapidly becoming fully machine readable

— Me # 16th March 2023, 1:09 am

“AI” has for recent memory been a marketing term anyway. Deep learning and variations have had a good run at being what people mean when they refer to AI, probably overweighting towards big convolution based computer vision models.

Now, “AI” in people’s minds means generative models.

That’s it, it doesn’t mean generative models are replacing CNNs, just like CNNs don’t replace SVMs or regression or whatever. It’s just that pop culture has fallen in love with something else.

— version_five # 15th March 2023, 9:05 pm

We call on the field to recognize that applications that aim to believably mimic humans bring risk of extreme harms. Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical Al development, where downstream effects need to be understood and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and different social groups.

— Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell # 15th March 2023, 3:30 pm

We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. [...] We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.

— OpenAI # 14th March 2023, 5:02 pm

We introduce Alpaca 7B, a model fine-tuned from the LLaMA 7B model on 52K instruction-following demonstrations. Alpaca behaves similarly to OpenAI’s text-davinci-003, while being surprisingly small and easy/cheap to reproduce (<600$).

— Alpaca: A Strong Open-Source Instruction-Following Model # 13th March 2023, 6:18 pm

I’ve successfully run LLaMA 7B model on my 4GB RAM Raspberry Pi 4. It’s super slow about 10sec/token. But it looks we can run powerful cognitive pipelines on a cheap hardware.

— Artem Andreenko # 12th March 2023, 6:22 pm

What could I do with a universal function — a tool for turning just about any X into just about any Y with plain language instructions?

— Robin Sloan # 10th March 2023, 6:02 pm

Since November, OpenAI has already updated ChatGPT several times. The researchers are using a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking). This work pits multiple chatbots against each other: one chatbot plays the adversary and attacks another chatbot by generating text to force it to buck its usual constraints and produce unwanted responses. Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT’s training data in the hope that it learns to ignore them.

— The inside story of how ChatGPT was built # 5th March 2023, 10:04 pm