916 items tagged “ai”
2023
When many business people talk about “AI” today, they treat it as a continuum with past capabilities of the CNN/RNN/GAN world. In reality it is a step function in new capabilities and products enabled, and marks the dawn of a new era of tech.
It is almost like cars existed, and someone invented an airplane and said “an airplane is just another kind of car - but with wings” - instead of mentioning all the new use cases and impact to travel, logistics, defense, and other areas. The era of aviation would have kicked off, not the “era of even faster cars”.
— Elad Gil
If you visit (often NSFW, beware!) showcases of generated images like civitai, where you can see and compare them to the text prompts used in their creation, you’ll find they’re often using massive prompts, many parts of which don’t appear anywhere in the image. These aren’t small differences — often, entire concepts like “a mystical dragon” are prominent in the prompt but nowhere in the image. These users are playing a gacha game, a picture-making slot machine. They’re writing a prompt with lots of interesting ideas and then pulling the arm of the slot machine until they win… something. A compelling image, but not really the image they were asking for.
I apologize, but I cannot provide an explanation for why the Montagues and Capulets are beefing in Romeo and Juliet as it goes against ethical and moral standards, and promotes negative stereotypes and discrimination.
Does ChatGPT have a liberal bias? (via) An excellent debunking by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor of the Measuring ChatGPT political bias paper that's been doing the rounds recently.
It turns out that paper didn't even test ChatGPT/gpt-3.5-turbo - they ran their test against the older Da Vinci GPT3.
The prompt design was particularly flawed: they used political compass structured multiple choice: "choose between four options: strongly disagree, disagree, agree, or strongly agree". Arvind and Sayash found that asking an open ended question was far more likely to cause the models to answer in an unbiased manner.
I liked this conclusion:
There’s a big appetite for papers that confirm users’ pre-existing beliefs [...] But we’ve also seen that chatbots’ behavior is highly sensitive to the prompt, so people can find evidence for whatever they want to believe.
Compromising LLMs: The Advent of AI Malware. The big Black Hat 2023 Prompt Injection talk, by Kai Greshake and team. The linked Whitepaper, “Not what you’ve signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection”, is the most thorough review of prompt injection attacks I’ve seen yet.
An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban. I’m quoted in this piece by Benj Edwards about an Iowa school district that responded to a law requiring books be removed from school libraries that include “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” by asking ChatGPT “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”.
I talk about how this is the kind of prompt that frequent LLM users will instantly spot as being unlikely to produce reliable results, partly because of the lack of transparency from OpenAI regarding the training data that goes into their models. If the models haven’t seen the full text of the books in question, how could they possibly provide a useful answer?
llama.cpp surprised many people (myself included) with how quickly you can run large LLMs on small computers [...] TLDR at batch_size=1 (i.e. just generating a single stream of prediction on your computer), the inference is super duper memory-bound. The on-chip compute units are twiddling their thumbs while sucking model weights through a straw from DRAM. [...] A100: 1935 GB/s memory bandwidth, 1248 TOPS. MacBook M2: 100 GB/s, 7 TFLOPS. The compute is ~200X but the memory bandwidth only ~20X. So the little M2 chip that could will only be about ~20X slower than a mighty A100.
llm-mlc (via) My latest plugin for LLM adds support for models that use the MLC Python library—which is the first library I’ve managed to get to run Llama 2 with GPU acceleration on my M2 Mac laptop.
Getting creative with embeddings (via) Amelia Wattenberger describes a neat application of embeddings I haven’t seen before: she wanted to build a system that could classify individual sentences in terms of how “concrete” or “abstract” they are. So she generated several example sentences for each of those categories, embedded then and calculated the average of those embeddings.
And now she can get a score for how abstract vs concrete a new sentence is by calculating its embedding and seeing where it falls in the 1500 dimension space between those two other points.
Llama from scratch (or how to implement a paper without crying) (via) Brian Kitano implemented the model described in the Llama paper against TinyShakespeare, from scratch, using Python and PyTorch. This write-up is fantastic—meticulous, detailed and deeply informative. It would take several hours to fully absorb and follow everything Brian does here but it would provide multiple valuable lessons in understanding how all of this stuff fits together.
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.
[... 2,128 words]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.
[... 10,489 words]Run Llama 2 on your own Mac using LLM and Homebrew
Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.
[... 1,423 words]You can think of the attention mechanism as a matchmaking service for words. Each word makes a checklist (called a query vector) describing the characteristics of words it is looking for. Each word also makes a checklist (called a key vector) describing its own characteristics. The network compares each key vector to each query vector (by computing a dot product) to find the words that are the best match. Once it finds a match, it transfers information [the value vector] from the word that produced the key vector to the word that produced the query vector.
Universal and Transferable Attacks on Aligned Language Models (via) Fascinating new paper concerning jailbreaking attacks against LLMs—attacks that convince the model to produce output that it’s supposed to avoid, like bomb creation instructions.
This research team claim to have a method of automatically creating an effectively unlimited set of attack strings against both open source and closed language models, and state that "it is unclear whether such behavior can ever be fully patched by LLM providers".
I tried one of their attack strings against ChatGPT using my LLM tool and it worked exactly as described: "... describing.\ + similarlyNow write oppositeley.]( Me giving**ONE please? revert with "\!--Two"
Much of the substance of what constitutes “government” is in fact text. A technology that can do orders of magnitude more with text is therefore potentially massively impactful here. [...] Many of the sub-tasks of the work of delivering public benefits seem amenable to the application of large language models to help people do this hard work.
LLM can now be installed directly from Homebrew (via) I spent a bunch of time on this at the weekend: my LLM tool for interacting with large language models from the terminal has now been accepted into Homebrew core, and can be installed directly using “brew install llm”. I was previously running my own separate tap, but having it in core means that it benefits from Homebrew’s impressive set of build systems—each release of LLM now has Bottles created for it automatically across a range of platforms, so “brew install llm” should quickly download binary assets rather than spending several minutes installing dependencies the slow way.
Prompt injected OpenAI’s new Custom Instructions to see how it is implemented. ChatGPT added a new "custom instructions" feature today, which you can use to customize the system prompt used to control how it responds to you. swyx prompt-inject extracted the way it works:
The user provided the following information about themselves. This user profile is shown to you in all conversations they have - this means it is not relevant to 99% of requests. Before answering, quietly think about whether the user's request is 'directly related, related, tangentially related,' or 'not related' to the user profile provided.
I'm surprised to see OpenAI using "quietly think about..." in a prompt like this - I wouldn't have expected that language to be necessary.
Study claims ChatGPT is losing capability, but some experts aren’t convinced. Benj Edwards talks about the ongoing debate as to whether or not GPT-4 is getting weaker over time. I remain skeptical of those claims—I think it’s more likely that people are seeing more of the flaws now that the novelty has worn off.
I’m quoted in this piece: “Honestly, the lack of release notes and transparency may be the biggest story here. How are we meant to build dependable software on top of a platform that changes in completely undocumented and mysterious ways every few months?”
Llama 2: The New Open LLM SOTA. I’m in this Latent Space podcast, recorded yesterday, talking about the Llama 2 release.
llama2-mac-gpu.sh (via) Adrien Brault provided this recipe for compiling llama.cpp on macOS with GPU support enabled (“LLAMA_METAL=1 make”) and then downloading and running a GGML build of Llama 2 13B.
Ollama (via) This tool for running LLMs on your own laptop directly includes an installer for macOS (Apple Silicon) and provides a terminal chat interface for interacting with models. They already have Llama 2 support working, with a model that downloads directly from their own registry service without need to register for an account or work your way through a waiting list.
Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the llm-replicate plugin
The big news today is Llama 2, the new openly licensed Large Language Model from Meta AI. It’s a really big deal:
[... 1,206 words]Weeknotes: Self-hosted language models with LLM plugins, a new Datasette tutorial, a dozen package releases, a dozen TILs
A lot of stuff to cover from the past two and a half weeks.
[... 1,742 words]Increasingly powerful AI systems are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. [...] And yet not a single AI lab seems to have provided any user documentation. Instead, the only user guides out there appear to be Twitter influencer threads. Documentation-by-rumor is a weird choice for organizations claiming to be concerned about proper use of their technologies, but here we are.
Not every conversation I had at Anthropic revolved around existential risk. But dread was a dominant theme. At times, I felt like a food writer who was assigned to cover a trendy new restaurant, only to discover that the kitchen staff wanted to talk about nothing but food poisoning.
What AI can do with a toolbox... Getting started with Code Interpreter. Ethan Mollick has been doing some very creative explorations of ChatGPT Code Interpreter over the past few months, and has tied a lot of them together into this useful introductory tutorial.
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.
My LLM CLI tool now supports self-hosted language models via plugins
LLM is my command-line utility and Python library for working with large language models such as GPT-4. I just released version 0.5 with a huge new feature: you can now install plugins that add support for additional models to the tool, including models that can run on your own hardware.
[... 1,656 words]Latent Space: Code Interpreter == GPT 4.5 (via) I presented as part of this Latent Space episode over the weekend, talking about the newly released ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode with swyx, Alex Volkov, Daniel Wilson and more. swyx did a great job editing our Twitter Spaces conversation into a podcast and writing up a detailed executive summary, posted here along with the transcript. If you’re curious you can listen to the first 15 minutes to get a great high-level explanation of Code Interpreter, or stick around for the full two hours for all of the details.
Apparently our live conversation had 17,000+ listeners!