Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Zen of Python, Unix, and LLMs. Here’s the YouTube recording of my 1.5 hour conversation with Hugo Bowne-Anderson yesterday.

I fed a Whisper transcript to Google Gemini Pro 1.5 and asked it for the themes from our conversation, and it said we talked about “Python’s success and versatility, the rise and potential of LLMs, data sharing and ethics in the age of LLMs, Unix philosophy and its influence on software development and the future of programming and human-computer interaction”.

# 9:04 pm / python, speaking, ai, whisper, llms, gemini

GGUF, the long way around (via) Vicki Boykis dives deep into the GGUF format used by llama.cpp, after starting with a detailed description of how PyTorch models work and how they are traditionally persisted using Python pickle.

Pickle lead to safetensors, a format that avoided the security problems with downloading and running untrusted pickle files.

Llama.cpp introduced GGML, which popularized 16-bit (as opposed to 32-bit) quantization and bundled metadata and tensor data in a single file.

GGUF fixed some design flaws in GGML and is the default format used by Llama.cpp today.

# 9:39 pm / ai, pytorch, generative-ai, llama, llms, vicki-boykis

Datasette 1.0a12. Another alpha release, this time with a new query_actions() plugin hook, a new design for the table, database and query actions menus, a “does not contain” table filter and a fix for a minor bug with the JavaScript makeColumnActions() plugin mechanism.

# 11:56 pm / projects, datasette