Simon Willison’s Weblog

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487 items tagged “ai”

2023

llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer

Mozilla’s innovation group and Justine Tunney just released llamafile, and I think it’s now the single best way to get started running Large Language Models (think your own local copy of ChatGPT) on your own computer.

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MonadGPT (via) “What would have happened if ChatGPT was invented in the 17th century? MonadGPT is a possible answer.

MonadGPT is a finetune of Mistral-Hermes 2 on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French and Latin, mostly coming from EEBO and Gallica.

Like the original Mistral-Hermes, MonadGPT can be used in conversation mode. It will not only answer in an historical language and style but will use historical and dated references.” # 27th November 2023, 4:01 am

Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition

A neat thing about podcast appearances is that, thanks to Whisper transcriptions, I can often repurpose parts of them as written content for my blog.

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This is nonsensical. There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria # 26th November 2023, 4:13 am

I’m on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board

Newsroom Robots is a weekly podcast exploring the intersection of AI and journalism, hosted by Nikita Roy.

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To some degree, the whole point of the tech industry’s embrace of “ethics” and “safety” is about reassurance. Companies realize that the technologies they are selling can be disconcerting and disruptive; they want to reassure the public that they’re doing their best to protect consumers and society. At the end of the day, though, we now know there’s no reason to believe that those efforts will ever make a difference if the company’s “ethics” end up conflicting with its money. And when have those two things ever not conflicted?

Lucas Ropek # 23rd November 2023, 8:41 pm

The 6 Types of Conversations with Generative AI. I’ve hoping to see more user research on how users interact with LLMs for a while. Here’s a study from Nielsen Norman Group, who conducted a 2-week diary study involving 18 participants, then interviewed 14 of them.

They identified six categories of conversation, and made some resulting design recommendations.

A key observation is that “search style” queries (just a few keywords) often indicate users who are new to LLMs, and should be identified as a sign that the user needs more inline education on how to best harness the tool.

Suggested follow-up prompts are valuable for most of the types of conversation identified. # 23rd November 2023, 5:37 pm

YouTube: Intro to Large Language Models. Andrej Karpathy is an outstanding educator, and this one hour video offers an excellent technical introduction to LLMs.

At 42m Andrej expands on his idea of LLMs as the center of a new style of operating system, tying together tools and and a filesystem and multimodal I/O.

There’s a comprehensive section on LLM security—jailbreaking, prompt injection, data poisoning—at the 45m mark.

I also appreciated his note on how parameter size maps to file size: Llama 70B is 140GB, because each of those 70 billion parameters is a 2 byte 16bit floating point number on disk. # 23rd November 2023, 5:02 pm

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo.

@OpenAI # 22nd November 2023, 6:04 am

Claude: How to use system prompts. Documentation for the new system prompt support added in Claude 2.1. The design surprises me a little: the system prompt is just the text that comes before the first instance of the text “Human: ...”—but Anthropic promise that instructions in that section of the prompt will be treated differently and followed more closely than any instructions that follow.

This whole page of documentation is giving me some pretty serious prompt injection red flags to be honest. Anthropic’s recommended way of using their models is entirely based around concatenating together strings of text using special delimiter phrases.

I’ll give it points for honesty though. OpenAI use JSON to field different parts of the prompt, but under the hood they’re all concatenated together with special tokens into a single token stream. # 22nd November 2023, 4:31 am

Introducing Claude 2.1. Anthropic’s Claude used to have the longest token context of any of the major models: 100,000 tokens, which is about 300 pages. Then GPT-4 Turbo came out with 128,000 tokens and Claude lost one of its key differentiators.

Claude is back! Version 2.1, announced today, bumps the token limit up to 200,000—and also adds support for OpenAI-style system prompts, a feature I’ve been really missing.

They also announced tool use, but that’s only available for a very limited set of partners to preview at the moment. # 22nd November 2023, 4:28 am

Sam Altman expelling Toner with the pretext of an inoffensive page in a paper no one read would have given him a temporary majority with which to appoint a replacement director, and then further replacement directors. These directors would, naturally, agree with Sam Altman, and he would have a full, perpetual board majority—the board, which is the only oversight on the OA CEO. Obviously, as an extremely experienced VC and CEO, he knew all this and how many votes he (thought he) had on the board, and the board members knew this as well—which is why they had been unable to agree on replacement board members all this time.

Gwern # 22nd November 2023, 3:53 am

Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported

Written journalism is full of conventions that hint at the underlying reporting process, many of which are not entirely obvious. Learning how to read and interpret these can help you get a lot more out of the news.

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Before Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding. This is the first piece of reporting I’ve seen on the OpenAI situation which has offered a glimmer of an explanation as to what happened.

It sounds like the board had been fighting about things for over a year—notably including who should replace departed members, which is how they’d shrunk down to just six people.

There’s also an interesting detail in here about the formation of Anthropic:

“Mr. Sutskever’s frustration with Mr. Altman echoed what had happened in 2021 when another senior A.I. scientist left OpenAI to form the company Anthropic. That scientist and other researchers went to the board to try to push Mr. Altman out. After they failed, they gave up and departed, according to three people familiar with the attempt to push Mr. Altman out.” # 22nd November 2023, 12:31 am

The way I think about the AI of the future is not as someone as smart as you or as smart as me, but as an automated organization that does science and engineering and development and manufacturing.

Ilya Sutskever # 21st November 2023, 6:59 pm

And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it’s true, that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And OpenAI’s new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for their capped return and said “bye” and went back to running OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign, carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity’s problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And capitalism came to an end.

Matt Levine, in a hypothetical # 20th November 2023, 9:12 pm

The company pressed forward and launched ChatGPT on November 30. It was such a low-key event that many employees who weren’t directly involved, including those in safety functions, didn’t even realize it had happened. Some of those who were aware, according to one employee, had started a betting pool, wagering how many people might use the tool during its first week. The highest guess was 100,000 users. OpenAI’s president tweeted that the tool hit 1 million within the first five days. The phrase low-key research preview became an instant meme within OpenAI; employees turned it into laptop stickers.

Inside the Chaos at OpenAI # 20th November 2023, 4:38 am

Inside the Chaos at OpenAI (via) Outstanding reporting on the current situation at OpenAI from Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel, informed by Karen’s research for a book she is currently writing. There are all sorts of fascinating details in here that I haven’t seen reported anywhere, and it strongly supports the theory that this entire situation (Sam Altman being fired by the board of the OpenAI non-profit) resulted from deep disagreements within OpenAI concerning speed to market and commercialization of their technology v.s. safety research and cautious progress towards AGI. # 20th November 2023, 4:35 am

Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI. The board of the non-profit in control of OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman yesterday, which is sending seismic waves around the AI technology industry. This overview by Benj Edwards is the best condensed summary I’ve seen yet of everything that’s known so far. # 18th November 2023, 8:14 pm

The EU AI Act now proposes to regulate “foundational models”, i.e. the engine behind some AI applications. We cannot regulate an engine devoid of usage. We don’t regulate the C language because one can use it to develop malware. Instead, we ban malware and strengthen network systems (we regulate usage). Foundational language models provide a higher level of abstraction than the C language for programming computer systems; nothing in their behaviour justifies a change in the regulatory framework.

Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI # 16th November 2023, 11:29 am

“Learn from your chats” ChatGPT feature preview (via) 7 days ago a Reddit user posted a screenshot of what’s presumably a trial feature of ChatGPT: a “Learn from your chats” toggle in the settings.

The UI says: “Your primary GPT will continually improve as you chat, picking up on details and preferences to tailor its responses to you.”

It provides the following examples: “I move to SF in two weeks”, “Always code in Python”, “Forget everything about my last project”—plus an option to reset it.

No official announcement yet. # 16th November 2023, 10:44 am

Fleet Context. This project took the source code and documentation for 1221 popular Python libraries and ran them through the OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002 embedding model, then made those pre-calculated embedding vectors available as Parquet files for download from S3 or via a custom Python CLI tool.

I haven’t seen many projects release pre-calculated embeddings like this, it’s an interesting initiative. # 15th November 2023, 10:20 pm

I’ve resigned from my role leading the Audio team at Stability AI, because I don’t agree with the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is ‘fair use’.

[...] I disagree because one of the factors affecting whether the act of copying is fair use, according to Congress, is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”. Today’s generative AI models can clearly be used to create works that compete with the copyrighted works they are trained on. So I don’t see how using copyrighted works to train generative AI models of this nature can be considered fair use.

But setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works.

Ed Newton-Rex # 15th November 2023, 9:31 pm

Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?

The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots that other Plus subscribers can then talk to.

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[On Meta’s Galactica LLM launch] We did this with a 8 person team which is an order of magnitude fewer people than other LLM teams at the time.

We were overstretched and lost situational awareness at launch by releasing demo of a *base model* without checks. We were aware of what potential criticisms would be, but we lost sight of the obvious in the workload we were under.

One of the considerations for a demo was we wanted to understand the distribution of scientific queries that people would use for LLMs (useful for instruction tuning and RLHF). Obviously this was a free goal we gave to journalists who instead queried it outside its domain. But yes we should have known better.

We had a “good faith” assumption that we’d share the base model, warts and all, with four disclaimers about hallucinations on the demo—so people could see what it could do (openness). Again, obviously this didn’t work.

Ross Taylor # 15th November 2023, 1:15 am

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (via) James Somers in the New Yorker, talking about the impact of GPT-4 on programming as a profession. Despite the headline this piece is a nuanced take on this subject, which I found myself mostly agreeing with.

I particularly liked this bit, which reflects my most optimistic viewpoint: I think AI assisted programming is going to shave a lot of the frustration off learning to code, which I hope brings many more people into the fold:

“What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.” # 14th November 2023, 4:36 am

Two things in AI may need regulation: reckless deployment of certain potentially harmful AI applications (same as any software really), and monopolistic behavior on the part of certain LLM providers. The technology itself doesn’t need regulation anymore than databases or transistors. [...] Putting size/compute caps on deep learning models is akin to putting size caps on databases or transistor count caps on electronics. It’s pointless and it won’t age well.

François Chollet # 13th November 2023, 1:46 am

ChatGPT: Dejargonizer. I built a custom GPT. Paste in some text with unknown jargon or acronyms and it will try to guess the context and give you back an explanation of each term. # 11th November 2023, 10:17 pm

AGI is Being Achieved Incrementally (OpenAI DevDay w/ Simon Willison, Alex Volkov, Jim Fan, Raza Habib, Shreya Rajpal, Rahul Ligma, et al). I participated in an an hour long conversation today about the new things released at OpenAI DevDay, now available on the Latent Space podcast. # 8th November 2023, 2:50 am

Fine-tuning GPT3.5-turbo based on 140k slack messages. Ross Lazerowitz spent $83.20 creating a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 turbo model based on 140,000 of his Slack messages (10,399,747 tokens), massaged into a JSONL file suitable for use with the OpenAI fine-tuning API.

Then he told the new model “write a 500 word blog post on prompt engineering”, and it replied “Sure, I shall work on that in the morning”. # 8th November 2023, 2:44 am