Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 24th April 2024

A bad survey won’t tell you it’s bad. It’s actually really hard to find out that a bad survey is bad — or to tell whether you have written a good or bad set of questions. Bad code will have bugs. A bad interface design will fail a usability test. It’s possible to tell whether you are having a bad user interview right away. Feedback from a bad survey can only come in the form of a second source of information contradicting your analysis of the survey results.

Most seductively, surveys yield responses that are easy to count and counting things feels so certain and objective and truthful.

Even if you are counting lies.

Erika Hall

# 12:31 am / surveys, usability, userexperience

openelm/README-pretraining.md. Apple released something big three hours ago, and I’m still trying to get my head around exactly what it is.

The parent project is called CoreNet, described as “A library for training deep neural networks”. Part of the release is a new LLM called OpenELM, which includes completely open source training code and a large number of published training checkpoint.

I’m linking here to the best documentation I’ve found of that training data: it looks like the bulk of it comes from RefinedWeb, RedPajama, The Pile and Dolma.

# 2:57 am / apple, ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data

When I said “Send a text message to Julian Chokkattu,” who’s a friend and fellow AI Pin reviewer over at Wired, I thought I’d be asked what I wanted to tell him. Instead, the device simply said OK and told me it sent the words “Hey Julian, just checking in. How's your day going?” to Chokkattu. I've never said anything like that to him in our years of friendship, but I guess technically the AI Pin did do what I asked.

Cherlynn Low

# 3:07 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms