Simon Willison’s Weblog

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March 2023

98 posts: 10 entries, 46 links, 20 quotes, 22 beats

March 28, 2023

I would say ChatGPT (mostly the new GPT-4 model), with a lot of hand-holding and cajoling from me, wrote 60-70% of the code (PHP, Javascript, CSS, SQL) for this AMA site. And we easily did it in a third of the time it would have taken me by myself, without having to look something up on Stack Overflow every four minutes or endlessly consulting CSS and PHP reference guides or tediously writing tests, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I never would have even embarked on building this little site-let had ChatGPT not existed...I would have done something much simpler and more manual instead. And it was a blast. I had so much fun and learned so much along the way.

Jason Kottke

# 10:36 pm / chatgpt, ai, jason-kottke, llms

March 29, 2023

gpt4all. Similar to Alpaca, here’s a project which takes the LLaMA base model and fine-tunes it on instruction examples generated by GPT-3—in this case, it’s 800,000 examples generated using the ChatGPT GPT 3.5 turbo model (Alpaca used 52,000 generated by regular GPT-3). This is currently the easiest way to get a LLaMA derived chatbot running on your own computer: the repo includes compiled binaries for running on M1/M2, Intel Mac, Windows and Linux and provides a link to download the 3.9GB 4-bit quantized model.

# 6:03 pm / open-source, ai, generative-ai, llama, local-llms, llms, fine-tuning

Making SQLite extensions npm install’able for Node.js, and on deno.land/x for Deno (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to get his “pip install X” trick for distributing compiled SQLite extensions to work for Node too! Now you can “npm install” 10 of his extensions, including sqlite-regex and sqlite-xsv and sqlite-http and sqlite-html and more, and attach them to a node-sqlite3 or better-sqlite3 connection. He’s bundled them for Deno too!

# 10:13 pm / nodejs, sqlite, npm, deno, alex-garcia

March 30, 2023

Schillace Laws of Semantic AI (via) Principles for prompt engineering against large language models, developed by Microsoft’s Sam Schillace.

# 12:20 am / ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms

TIL Interactive row selection prototype with Datasette — I added a new [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms/) tag to my blog, for my content about Large Language Models.

March 31, 2023

Downloading and converting the original models (Cerebras-GPT) (via) Georgi Gerganov added support for the Apache 2 licensed Cerebras-GPT language model to his ggml C++ inference library, as used by llama.cpp.

# 4:28 am / llama, local-llms, llms, cerebras, llama-cpp

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide (via) Ethan Mollick’s guide to practical usage of large language model chatbot like ChatGPT 3.5 and 4, Bing, Claude and Bard is the best I’ve seen so far. He includes useful warnings about common traps and things that these models are both useful for and useless at.

# 6:17 am / bing, ai, chatgpt, bard, llms, ethan-mollick, claude

You’ll often find prompt engineers come from a history, philosophy, or English language background, because it’s wordplay. You're trying to distill the essence or meaning of something into a limited number of words.

Albert Phelps

# 5:54 pm / prompt-engineering, ai, llms