Simon Willison’s Weblog

What do people really ask chatbots? It’s a lot of sex and homework. Jeremy B. Merrill and Rachel Lerman at the Washington Post analyzed WildChat, a dataset of 1 million ChatGPT-style interactions collected and released by the Allen Institute for AI.

From a random sample of 458 queries they categorized the conversations as 21% creative writing and roleplay, 18% homework help, 17% "search and other inquiries", 15% work/business and 7% coding.

I talked to them a little for this story:

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of technology that has this many use cases,” said Simon Willison, a programmer and independent researcher.

# 4th August 2024, 6:59 pm / washington-post, generative-ai, chatgpt, ai, llms

Inside the secret list of websites that make AI chatbots sound smart. Washington Post story digging into the C4 dataset—Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, a filtered version of Common Crawl that’s often used for training large language models. They include a neat interactive tool for searching a domain to see if it’s included—TIL that simonwillison.net is the 106,649th ranked site in C4 by number of tokens, 189,767 total—0.0001% of the total token volume in C4.

# 19th April 2023, 1:35 pm / washington-post, llms, ai, generative-ai, training-data

Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required. (via) I’m quoted in this Washington Post article about prompt engineering by Drew Harwell. “There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ’Oh lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box. But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells—and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.”

# 25th February 2023, 2:14 pm / washington-post, prompt-engineering, ai, generative-ai, llms

How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions (via) Kevin Schaul describes the Washington Post’s emerging open source GIS stack: OpenMapTiles, Maputnik, PMTiles and Maplibre-gl-js.

# 17th February 2023, 6:45 pm / maps, washington-post, openstreetmap, opensearch

Apple’s tightly controlled App Store is teeming with scams. I’m quoted in an article in the Washington Post today (linked at the top of the homepage!) explaining how I got scammed on the App Store and spent $19 on a TV remote app with a similar name to the official Samsung app. I mistakenly assumed that the App Store review process wouldn’t allow an app called “Smart Things” to show up in search when I was looking for SmartThings, the official name—and assumed that Samsung were nickel-and-diming their customers rather than expecting the App Store review process to have failed so obviously.

# 6th June 2021, 10:13 pm / washington-post, scams, appstore

Washington Post Update. Peter Harkins summarises the large number of Django-powered database journalism projects released by the Post since September 2007.

# 16th January 2009, 12:18 pm / peter-harkins, washington-post, django, python, data-journalism

Washington Post and Facebook. Deryck Hodge on hacking against Facebook API using Django.

# 19th June 2007, 10:33 am / django, deryckhodge, facebook, api, washington-post

Knight Foundation grant. Adrian’s leaving the Washington Post to found EveryBlock, a startup focusing on local news and information in the style of chicagocrime.org.

# 24th May 2007, 4:27 pm / everyblock, adrian-holovaty, chicagocrime, startup, washington-post