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Items tagged claude in 2023

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Long context prompting for Claude 2.1. Claude 2.1 has a 200,000 token context, enough for around 500 pages of text. Convincing it to answer a question based on a single sentence buried deep within that content can be difficult, but Anthropic found that adding “Assistant: Here is the most relevant sentence in the context:” to the end of the prompt was enough to raise Claude 2.1’s score from 27% to 98% on their evaluation. # 6th December 2023, 11:44 pm

Claude: How to use system prompts. Documentation for the new system prompt support added in Claude 2.1. The design surprises me a little: the system prompt is just the text that comes before the first instance of the text “Human: ...”—but Anthropic promise that instructions in that section of the prompt will be treated differently and followed more closely than any instructions that follow.

This whole page of documentation is giving me some pretty serious prompt injection red flags to be honest. Anthropic’s recommended way of using their models is entirely based around concatenating together strings of text using special delimiter phrases.

I’ll give it points for honesty though. OpenAI use JSON to field different parts of the prompt, but under the hood they’re all concatenated together with special tokens into a single token stream. # 22nd November 2023, 4:31 am

Introducing Claude 2.1. Anthropic’s Claude used to have the longest token context of any of the major models: 100,000 tokens, which is about 300 pages. Then GPT-4 Turbo came out with 128,000 tokens and Claude lost one of its key differentiators.

Claude is back! Version 2.1, announced today, bumps the token limit up to 200,000—and also adds support for OpenAI-style system prompts, a feature I’ve been really missing.

They also announced tool use, but that’s only available for a very limited set of partners to preview at the moment. # 22nd November 2023, 4:28 am

Claude was trained on data up until December 2022, but may know some events into early 2023.

How up-to-date is Claude's training data? # 9th October 2023, 1:25 am

Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude (via) UC Santa Cruz history professor Benjamin Breen puts LLMs to work on historical texts. They do an impressive job of translating flaky OCRd text from 1599 Latin and 1707 Portuguese.

“It’s not about getting the AI to replace you. Instead, it’s asking the AI to act as a kind of polymathic research assistant to supply you with leads.” # 4th October 2023, 1:49 am

The AI-assistant wars heat up with Claude Pro, a new ChatGPT Plus rival. I’m quoted in this piece about the new Claude Pro $20/month subscription from Anthropic:

> Willison has also run into problems with Claude’s morality filter, which has caused him trouble by accident: “I tried to use it against a transcription of a podcast episode, and it processed most of the text before—right in front of my eyes—it deleted everything it had done! I eventually figured out that they had started talking about bomb threats against data centers towards the end of the episode, and Claude effectively got triggered by that and deleted the entire transcript.” # 10th September 2023, 5:07 pm

How I make annotated presentations

Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.

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Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Llama 2.

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claude.ai. Anthropic’s new Claude 2 model is available to use online, and it has a 100k token context window and the ability to upload files to it—I tried uploading a text file with 34,000 tokens in it (according to my ttok CLI tool, counting using the GPT-3.5 tokenizer) and it gave me a workable summary. # 12th July 2023, 4:39 pm

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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ChatGPT should include inline tips

In OpenAI isn’t doing enough to make ChatGPT’s limitations clear James Vincent argues that OpenAI’s existing warnings about ChatGPT’s confounding ability to convincingly make stuff up are not effective.

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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