November 2023
85 posts: 8 entries, 30 links, 15 quotes, 32 beats
Nov. 15, 2023
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.
Nov. 16, 2023
“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.
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
tldraw/draw-a-ui (via) Absolutely spectacular GPT-4 Vision API demo. Sketch out a rough UI prototype using the open source tldraw drawing app, then select a set of components and click "Make Real" (after giving it an OpenAI API key). It generates a PNG snapshot of your selection and sends that to GPT-4 with instructions to turn it into a Tailwind HTML+JavaScript prototype, then adds the result as an iframe next to your mockup.
You can then make changes to your mockup, select it and the previous mockup and click "Make Real" again to ask for an updated version that takes your new changes into account.
This is such a great example of innovation at the UI layer, and everything is open source. Check app/lib/getHtmlFromOpenAI.ts for the system prompt that makes it work.
Nov. 17, 2023
HTML Web Components: An Example
(via)
Jim Nielsen provides a clear example illustrating the idea of the recently coined "HTML Web Components" pattern. It's Web Components as progressive enhancement: in this example a <user-avatar> custom element wraps a regular image, then JavaScript defines a Web Component that enhances that image. If the JavaScript fails to load the image still displays.
Nov. 18, 2023
It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated (via) Miguel Grinberg explains the deprecation of datetime.utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp() in Python 3.12, since they return naive datetime objects which cause all sorts of follow-on problems.
The replacement idiom is datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc)
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.
Nov. 20, 2023
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.
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.
Cloudflare does not consider vary values in caching decisions. Here’s the spot in Cloudflare’s documentation where they hide a crucially important detail:
“Cloudflare does not consider vary values in caching decisions. Nevertheless, vary values are respected when Vary for images is configured and when the vary header is vary: accept-encoding.”
This means you can’t deploy an application that uses content negotiation via the Accept header behind the Cloudflare CDN—for example serving JSON or HTML for the same URL depending on the incoming Accept header. If you do, Cloudflare may serve cached JSON to an HTML client or vice-versa.
There’s an exception for image files, which Cloudflare added support for in September 2021 (for Pro accounts only) in order to support formats such as WebP which may not have full support across all browsers.
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
Nov. 21, 2023
An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid (via) Josh Comeau’s extremely clear guide to CSS grid, with interactive examples for all of the core properties.
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.
Nov. 22, 2023
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.
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.
[... 1,456 words]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
Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos
Three weeks of conferences and Datasette Cloud work, four days of chaos for OpenAI.
[... 766 words]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.
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.
I remember that they [Ev and Biz at Twitter in 2008] very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it's ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.” Because once you have a big enough user base, once you have enough people on a platform, once the likelihood of profit becomes high enough, you’re going to have spammers.
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