Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 10th January 2024

The Random Transformer (via) “Understand how transformers work by demystifying all the math behind them”—Omar Sanseviero from Hugging Face meticulously implements the transformer architecture behind LLMs from scratch using Python and numpy. There’s a lot to take in here but it’s all very clearly explained.

# 5:09 am / python, transformers, ai, numpy, generative-ai, llms

Release datasette-auth-tokens 0.4a5 — Datasette plugin for authenticating access using API tokens
Release datasette-auth-tokens 0.4a6 — Datasette plugin for authenticating access using API tokens
TIL literalinclude with markers for showing code in documentation — I [wanted to include](https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/1830) some example Python tests in the Datasette documentation - but since they were tests, I also wanted to execute them as part of my test suite to make sure they worked correctly.

You Can Build an App in 60 Minutes with ChatGPT, with Geoffrey Litt (via) YouTube interview between Dan Shipper and Geoffrey Litt. They talk about how ChatGPT can build working React applications and how this means you can build extremely niche applications that you woudn’t have considered working on before—then to demonstrate that idea, they collaborate to build a note-taking app to be used just during that specific episode recording, pasting React code from ChatGPT into Replit.

Geoffrey: “I started wondering what if we had a world where everybody could craft software tools that match the workflows they want to have, unique to themselves and not just using these pre-made tools. That’s what malleable software means to me.”

# 11:41 pm / ai, react, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, geoffrey-litt

AI versus old-school creativity: a 50-student, semester-long showdown (via) An interesting study in which 50 university students “wrote, coded, designed, modeled, and recorded creations with and without AI, then judged the results”.

This study seems to explore the approach of incremental prompting to produce an AI-driven final results. I use GPT-4 on a daily basis but my usage patterns are quite different: I very rarely let it actually write anything for me, instead using it as brainstorming partner, or to provide feedback, or as API reference or a thesaurus.

# 11:49 pm / education, ai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms

Tuesday, 9th January 2024
Thursday, 11th January 2024