Simon Willison’s Weblog

According to interviews with former employees, publishing executives, and experts associated with the early days of AMP, while it was waxing poetic about the value and future of the open web, Google was privately urging publishers into handing over near-total control of how their articles worked and looked and monetized. And it was wielding the web’s most powerful real estate — the top of search results — to get its way.

— David Pierce # 15th May 2023, 9:55 pm

The largest model in the PaLM 2 family, PaLM 2-L, is significantly smaller than the largest PaLM model but uses more training compute. Our evaluation results show that PaLM 2 models significantly outperform PaLM on a variety of tasks, including natural language generation, translation, and reasoning. These results suggest that model scaling is not the only way to improve performance. Instead, performance can be unlocked by meticulous data selection and efficient architecture/objectives. Moreover, a smaller but higher quality model significantly improves inference efficiency, reduces serving cost, and enables the model’s downstream application for more applications and users.

— PaLM 2 Technical Report (PDF) # 10th May 2023, 6:43 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

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