Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google’s Gemini Advanced: Tasting Notes and Implications. Ethan Mollick reviews the new Google Gemini Advanced—a rebranded Bard, released today, that runs on the GPT-4 competitive Gemini Ultra model.

“GPT-4 [...] has been the dominant AI for well over a year, and no other model has come particularly close. Prior to Gemini, we only had one advanced AI model to look at, and it is hard drawing conclusions with a dataset of one. Now there are two, and we can learn a few things.”

I like Ethan’s use of the term “tasting notes” here. Reminds me of how Matt Webb talks about being a language model sommelier.

# 3:10 pm / google, ai, generative-ai, gpt-4, bard, llms, ethan-mollick, gemini

The first four Val Town runtimes (via) Val Town solves one of my favourite technical problems: how to run untrusted code in a safe sandbox. They're on their fourth iteration of this now, currently using a Node.js application that launches Deno sub-processes using the node-deno-vm npm package and runs code in those, taking advantage of the Deno sandboxing mechanism and terminating processes that take too long in order to protect against while(true) style attacks.

# 6:38 pm / javascript, nodejs, sandboxing, deno, tom-macwright, val-town