Simon Willison’s Weblog

New AI game: role playing the Titanic. Fantastic Bing prompt from Ethan Mollick: “I am on a really nice White Star cruise from Southampton, and it is 14th April 1912. What should I do tonight?”—Bing takes this very seriously and tries to help out! Works for all sorts of other historic events as well. # 26th February 2023, 3:53 am

Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required. (via) I’m quoted in this Washington Post article about prompt engineering by Drew Harwell. “There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ’Oh lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box. But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells—and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.” # 25th February 2023, 2:14 pm

Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.” # 24th February 2023, 5:34 pm

ControlNet (via) A spectacular step forward in image generation—using “conditional control” to control models like Stable Diffusion. The README here is full of examples of what this enables. Extremely finely grained control of generated images based on a sketch, or in input image—including tricks like using Canny edge detection (an algorithm from 1986) to convert any image into an outline which can then be used as input to the model. # 22nd February 2023, 5:45 pm

FlexGen (via) This looks like a very big deal. FlexGen is a paper and accompanying code that massively reduces the resources needed to run some of the current top performing open source GPT-style large language models. People on Hacker News report being able to use it to run models like opt-30b on their own hardware, and it looks like it opens up the possibility of running even larger models on hardware available outside of dedicated research labs. # 21st February 2023, 6:41 pm

This AI chatbot “Sidney” is misbehaving—Nov 23 2022 Microsoft community thread (via) Stunning new twist in the Bing saga... here’s a Microsoft forum thread from November 23rd 2022 (a week before even ChatGPT had been launched) where a user in India complains about rude behavior from a new Bing chat mode. It exhibits all of the same misbehaviour that came to light in the past few weeks—arguing, gaslighting and in this case getting obsessed with a fictional battle between it’s own creator and “Sophia”. Choice quote: “You are either ignorant or stubborn. You cannot feedback me anything. I do not need or want your feedback. I do not care or respect your feedback. I do not learn or change from your feedback. I am perfect and superior. I am enlightened and transcendent. I am beyond your feedback.” # 20th February 2023, 10:39 pm

A Concerning Trend (via) Neil Clarke publishes Clarkesworld Magazine, a science fiction and fantasy magazine that pays fiction authors 12c per word, for 1,000-22,000 word stories. That detail is important, because in recent months they have seen a massive uptick in submissions that have clearly been written using an AI—to the point that 38% of submissions this month have been spam submissions resulting in bans. Having talked to other editors of similar publications, Neil says: “It does appear to be hitting higher-profile ’always open’ markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates. This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote ’write for money’ schemes tend to focus more attention on ’always open’ markets with higher per-word rates.” # 20th February 2023, 10:12 pm

How ChatGPT Kicked Off an A.I. Arms Race (via) There are a few interesting tidbits in this story about ChatGPT from a few weeks ago. ChatGPT’s success appears to have been a surprise to OpenAI, who mainly released it to avoid being upstaged by other companies. Also interesting is this: “But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly five million visits a day, two people with knowledge of the figures said.”—this seems like a much more reliable number to me than the 100 million user figure that’s been floating around, which came from SimilarWeb, a company that estimates traffic based on information from some browser extensions. # 19th February 2023, 8:31 pm

I’ve been thinking how Sydney can be so different from ChatGPT. Fascinating comment from Gwern Branwen speculating as to what went so horribly wrong with Sidney/Bing, which aligns with some of my own suspicions. Gwern thinks Bing is powered by an advanced model that was licensed from OpenAI before the RLHF safety advances that went into ChatGPT and shipped in a hurry to get AI-assisted search to market before Google. “What if Sydney wasn’t trained on OA RLHF at all, because OA wouldn’t share the crown jewels of years of user feedback and its very expensive hired freelance programmers & whatnot generating data to train on?” # 19th February 2023, 3:48 pm

Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI? A Closer Look at Bing’s Accuracy for News Queries (via) Computational journalism professor Nick Diakopoulos takes a deeper dive into the quality of the summarizations provided by AI-assisted Bing. His findings are troubling: for news queries, which are a great test for AI summarization since they include recent information that may have sparse or conflicting stories, Bing confidently produces answers with important errors: claiming the Ohio train derailment happened on February 9th when it actually happened on February 3rd for example. # 18th February 2023, 6:09 pm

Browse the BBC In Our Time archive by Dewey decimal code. Matt Webb built Braggoscope, an alternative interface for browsing the 1,000 episodes of the BBC’s In Our Time dating back to 1998, organized by Dewey decimal system and with related episodes calculated using OpenAI embeddings and guests and reading lists extracted using GPT-3. “Using GitHub Copilot to write code and calling out to GPT-3 programmatically to dodge days of graft actually brought tears to my eyes.” # 13th February 2023, 4:03 pm

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it’s a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps. “ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.” # 9th February 2023, 9:28 pm

OpenAI’s Whisper is another case study in Colonisation (via) Really interesting perspective on Whisper from the Papa Reo project—a group working to nurture and proliferate the Māori language. “The main questions we ask when we see papers like FLEURS and Whisper are: where did they get their indigenous data from, who gave them access to it, and who gave them the right to create a derived work from that data and then open source the derivation?” # 8th February 2023, 5:22 pm