Simon Willison’s Weblog

llm-gpt4all. New release of my LLM plugin which builds on Nomic's excellent gpt4all Python library. I've upgraded to their latest version which adds support for Llama 3 8B Instruct, so after a 4.4GB model download this works:

llm -m Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct "say hi in Spanish" # 20th April 2024, 5:58 pm

datasette-import. A new plugin for importing data into Datasette. This is a replacement for datasette-paste, duplicating and extending its functionality. datasette-paste had grown beyond just dealing with pasted CSV/TSV/JSON data—it handles file uploads as well now—which inspired the new name. # 6th April 2024, 10:40 pm

llm-command-r. Cohere released Command R Plus today—an open weights (non commercial/research only) 104 billion parameter LLM, a big step up from their previous 35 billion Command R model.

Both models are fine-tuned for both tool use and RAG. The commercial API has features to expose this functionality, including a web-search connector which lets the model run web searches as part of answering the prompt and return documents and citations as part of the JSON response.

I released a new plugin for my LLM command line tool this morning adding support for the Command R models.

In addition to the two models it also adds a custom command for running prompts with web search enabled and listing the referenced documents. # 4th April 2024, 5:38 pm

llm-nomic-api-embed. My new plugin for LLM which adds API access to the Nomic series of embedding models. Nomic models can be run locally too, which makes them a great long-term commitment as there’s no risk of the models being retired in a way that damages the value of your previously calculated embedding vectors. # 31st March 2024, 3:17 pm

datasette-studio. I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be interesting to have a version of Datasette that comes bundled with a set of useful plugins, aimed at expanding Datasette’s default functionality to cover things like importing data and editing schemas.

This morning I built the very first experimental preview of what that could look like. Install it using pipx:

pipx install datasette-studio

I recommend pipx because it will ensure datasette-studio gets its own isolated environment, independent of any other Datasette installations you might have.

Now running “datasette-studio” instead of “datasette” will get you the version with the bundled plugins.

The implementation of this is fun—it’s a single pyproject.toml file defining the dependencies and setting up the datasette-studio CLI hook, which is enough to provide the full set of functionality.

Is this a good idea? I don’t know yet, but it’s certainly an interesting initial experiment. # 18th February 2024, 8:38 pm

llm-sentence-transformers 0.2. I added a new --trust-remote-code option when registering an embedding model, which means LLM can now run embeddings through the new Nomic AI nomic-embed-text-v1 model. # 4th February 2024, 7:39 pm

llm-embed-onnx. I wrote a new plugin for LLM that acts as a thin wrapper around onnx_embedding_models by Benjamin Anderson, providing access to seven embedding models that can run on the ONNX model framework.

The actual plugin is around 50 lines of code, which makes for a nice example of how thin a plugin wrapper can be that adds new models to my LLM tool. # 28th January 2024, 10:28 pm