Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items in May, 2023

Filters: Year: 2023 × Month: May × Sorted by date


OpenLLaMA. The first openly licensed model I’ve seen trained on the RedPajama dataset. This initial release is a 7B model trained on 200 billion tokens, but the team behind it are promising a full 1 trillion token model in the near future. I haven’t found a live demo of this one running anywhere yet. # 3rd May 2023, 8:58 pm

replit-code-v1-3b (via) As promised last week, Replit have released their 2.7b “Causal Language Model”, a foundation model trained from scratch in partnership with MosaicML with a focus on code completion. It’s licensed CC BY-SA-4.0 and is available for commercial use. They repo includes a live demo and initial experiments with it look good—you could absolutely run a local GitHub Copilot style editor on top of this model. # 3rd May 2023, 8:09 pm

We show for the first time that large-scale generative pretrained transformer (GPT) family models can be pruned to at least 50% sparsity in one-shot, without any retraining, at minimal loss of accuracy. [...] We can execute SparseGPT on the largest available open-source models, OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B, in under 4.5 hours, and can reach 60% unstructured sparsity with negligible increase in perplexity: remarkably, more than 100 billion weights from these models can be ignored at inference time.

SparseGPT, by Elias Frantar and Dan Alistarh # 3rd May 2023, 7:48 pm

Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).

[... 3120 words]

download-esm: a tool for downloading ECMAScript modules

I’ve built a new CLI tool, download-esm, which takes the name of an npm package and will attempt to download the ECMAScript module version of that package, plus all of its dependencies, directly from the jsDelivr CDN—and then rewrite all of the import statements to point to those local copies.

[... 1240 words]

Amnesty Uses Warped, AI-Generated Images to Portray Police Brutality in Colombia. I saw massive backlash against Amnesty Norway for this on Twitter, where people argued that using AI-generated images to portray human rights violations like this undermines Amnesty’s credibility. I agree: I think this is a very risky move. An Amnesty spokesperson told VICE Motherboard that they did this to provide coverage “without endangering anyone who was present”, since many protestors who participated in the national strike covered their faces to avoid being identified. # 1st May 2023, 9:32 pm

Let’s be bear or bunny

The Machine Learning Compilation group (MLC) are my favourite team of AI researchers at the moment.

[... 599 words]

A new onboarding experience on Mastodon. Reassuring to see this commitment to resolving some of the biggest pain points preventing people from adopting Mastodon, especially given it has meaningful competition as a federated social network in the form of Bluesky now. # 1st May 2023, 5:44 pm

Weeknotes: Miscellaneous research into Rye, ChatGPT Code Interpreter and openai-to-sqlite

I gave myself some time off stressing about my core responsibilities this week after PyCon, which meant allowing myself to be distracted by some miscellaneous research projects.

[... 891 words]