Simon Willison’s Weblog

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793 items tagged “ai”

2021

DALL·E: Creating Images from Text (via) “DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs.”. The examples in this paper are astonishing—“an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog” generates exactly that.

# 5th January 2021, 8:31 pm / machine-learning, ai, openai, dalle, generative-ai

2020

How GPT3 Works—Visualizations and Animations. Nice essay full of custom animations illustrating how GPT-3 actually works.

# 30th July 2020, 12:58 am / machine-learning, ai, gpt-3, generative-ai, llms

Tempering Expectations for GPT-3 and OpenAI’s API. Insightful commentary on GPT-3 (which is producing some ridiculously cool demos at the moment thanks to the invite-only OpenAI API) from Max Woolf.

# 18th July 2020, 7:29 pm / machine-learning, max-woolf, gpt-3, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms

When data is messy. I love this story: a neural network trained on images was asked what the most significant pixels in pictures of tench (a kind of fish) were: it returned pictures of fingers on a green background, because most of the tench photos it had seen were fisherfolk showing off their catch.

# 7th July 2020, 7:03 pm / machine-learning, ai

gpt2-headlines.ipynb. My earliest experiment with GPT-2, using gpt-2-simple by Max Woolf to generate new New York Times headlines based on a GPT-2 fine-tuned against headlines from different decades of that newspaper.

# 31st January 2020, 2:13 am / llms, generative-ai, ai, max-woolf

2019

I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.

John Carmack

# 14th November 2019, 1:18 am / ai

2018

Without deep understanding of the basic tools needed to build and train new algorithms, he says, researchers creating AIs resort to hearsay, like medieval alchemists. "People gravitate around cargo-cult practices," relying on "folklore and magic spells," adds François Chollet, a computer scientist at Google in Mountain View, California.

Matthew Hutson

# 26th December 2018, 4:53 pm / machine-learning, ai, francois-chollet

Relational databases are a commodity now, but they power a much larger fraction of the world’s economy that AI ever will. And no company has a “relational database strategy”.

Erik Bernhardsson

# 8th October 2018, 12:20 pm / ai, databases

Text to Image (via) Ridiculously entertaining demo by Cris Valenzuela that feeds any text you type to a neural network that then attempts to generate an image for your text.

# 18th August 2018, 5:33 pm / ai

Half of the time when companies say they need "AI" what they really need is a SELECT clause with GROUP BY.

Mat Velloso

# 1st June 2018, 2:35 pm / sql, ai

The synthetic voice of synthetic intelligence should sound synthetic. Successful spoofing of any kind destroys trust. When trust is gone, what remains becomes vicious fast.

Stewart Brand

# 10th May 2018, 4:56 am / stewartbrand, ai

Text Embedding Models Contain Bias. Here’s Why That Matters (via) Excellent discussion from the Google AI team of the enormous challenge of building machine learning models without accidentally encoding harmful bias in a way that cannot be easily detected.

# 17th April 2018, 8:54 pm / machine-learning, ai, generative-ai

2010

Originally, however, speech recognition was going to lead to artificial intelligence. Computing pioneer Alan Turing suggested in 1950 that we “provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.” Over half a century later, artificial intelligence has become prerequisite to understanding speech. We have neither the chicken nor the egg.

Robert Fortner

# 4th May 2010, 12:35 pm / ai, alan-turing, robert-fortner, speechrecognition, recovered