Simon Willison’s Weblog

files-to-prompt 0.5. My files-to-prompt tool (originally built using Claude 3 Opus back in April) had been accumulating a bunch of issues and PRs - I finally got around to spending some time with it and pushed a fresh release:

• New -n/--line-numbers flag for including line numbers in the output. Thanks, Dan Clayton. #38
• Fix for utf-8 handling on Windows. Thanks, David Jarman. #36
• --ignore patterns are now matched against directory names as well as file names, unless you pass the new --ignore-files-only flag. Thanks, Nick Powell. #30

I use this tool myself on an almost daily basis - it's fantastic for quickly answering questions about code. Recently I've been plugging it into Gemini 2.0 with its 2 million token context length, running recipes like this one:

git clone https://github.com/bytecodealliance/componentize-py
cd componentize-py
files-to-prompt . -c | llm -m gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 \
  -s 'How does this work? Does it include a python compiler or AST trick of some sort?'

I ran that question against the bytecodealliance/componentize-py repo - which provides a tool for turning Python code into compiled WASM - and got this really useful answer.

Here's another example. I decided to have o3-mini review how Datasette handles concurrent SQLite connections from async Python code - so I ran this:

git clone https://github.com/simonw/datasette
cd datasette/datasette
files-to-prompt database.py utils/__init__.py -c | \
  llm -m o3-mini -o reasoning_effort high \
  -s 'Output in markdown a detailed analysis of how this code handles the challenge of running SQLite queries from a Python asyncio application. Explain how it works in the first section, then explore the pros and cons of this design. In a final section propose alternative mechanisms that might work better.'

Here's the result. It did an extremely good job of explaining how my code works - despite being fed just the Python and none of the other documentation. Then it made some solid recommendations for potential alternatives.

I added a couple of follow-up questions (using llm -c) which resulted in a full working prototype of an alternative threadpool mechanism, plus some benchmarks.

One final example: I decided to see if there were any undocumented features in Litestream, so I checked out the repo and ran a prompt against just the .go files in that project:

git clone https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream
cd litestream
files-to-prompt . -e go -c | llm -m o3-mini \
  -s 'Write extensive user documentation for this project in markdown'

Once again, o3-mini provided a really impressively detailed set of unofficial documentation derived purely from reading the source.

# 14th February 2025, 4:14 am / projects, llms, gemini, llm, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, webassembly, python, async, datasette, sqlite, litestream

Nomic Embed Text V2: An Open Source, Multilingual, Mixture-of-Experts Embedding Model (via) Nomic continue to release the most interesting and powerful embedding models. Their latest is Embed Text V2, an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-lingual 1.9GB model (here it is on Hugging Face) trained on "1.6 billion high-quality data pairs", which is the first embedding model I've seen to use a Mixture of Experts architecture:

In our experiments, we found that alternating MoE layers with 8 experts and top-2 routing provides the optimal balance between performance and efficiency. This results in 475M total parameters in the model, but only 305M active during training and inference.

I first tried it out using uv run like this:

uv run \
  --with einops \
  --with sentence-transformers \
  --python 3.13 python

Then:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer("nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe", trust_remote_code=True)
sentences = ["Hello!", "¡Hola!"]
embeddings = model.encode(sentences, prompt_name="passage")
print(embeddings)

Then I got it working on my laptop using the llm-sentence-tranformers plugin like this:

llm install llm-sentence-transformers
llm install einops # additional necessary package
llm sentence-transformers register nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe --trust-remote-code

llm embed -m sentence-transformers/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe -c 'string to embed'

This outputs a 768 item JSON array of floating point numbers to the terminal. These are Matryoshka embeddings which means you can truncate that down to just the first 256 items and get similarity calculations that still work albeit slightly less well.

To use this for RAG you'll need to conform to Nomic's custom prompt format. For documents to be searched:

search_document: text of document goes here

And for search queries:

search_query: term to search for

I landed a new --prepend option for the llm embed-multi command to help with that, but it's not out in a full release just yet. (Update: it's now out in LLM 0.22.)

I also released llm-sentence-transformers 0.3 with some minor improvements to make running this model more smooth.

# 12th February 2025, 10:24 pm / embeddings, llm, nomic, ai, rag, uv, python

llm-sort (via) Delightful LLM plugin by Evangelos Lamprou which adds the ability to perform "semantic search" - allowing you to sort the contents of a file based on using a prompt against an LLM to determine sort order.

Best illustrated by these examples from the README:

llm sort --query "Which names is more suitable for a pet monkey?" names.txt

cat titles.txt | llm sort --query "Which book should I read to cook better?"

It works using this pairwise prompt, which is executed multiple times using Python's sorted(documents, key=functools.cmp_to_key(compare_callback)) mechanism:

Given the query:
{query}

Compare the following two lines:

Line A:
{docA}

Line B:
{docB}

Which line is more relevant to the query? Please answer with "Line A" or "Line B".

From the lobste.rs comments, Cole Kurashige:

I'm not saying I'm prescient, but in The Before Times I did something similar with Mechanical Turk

This made me realize that so many of the patterns we were using against Mechanical Turk a decade+ ago can provide hints about potential ways to apply LLMs.

# 11th February 2025, 8:50 pm / llm, plugins, generative-ai, ai, llms, python, mechanical-turk

Gemini 2.0 is now available to everyone. Big new Gemini 2.0 releases today:

• Gemini 2.0 Pro (Experimental) is Google's "best model yet for coding performance and complex prompts" - currently available as a free preview.
• Gemini 2.0 Flash is now generally available.

• Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite looks particularly interesting:

  We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the price and speed of 1.5 Flash. We wanted to keep improving quality, while still maintaining cost and speed. So today, we’re introducing 2.0 Flash-Lite, a new model that has better quality than 1.5 Flash, at the same speed and cost. It outperforms 1.5 Flash on the majority of benchmarks.

That means Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite is priced at 7.5c/million input tokens and 30c/million output tokens - half the price of OpenAI's GPT-4o mini (15c/60c).

Gemini 2.0 Flash isn't much more expensive: 10c/million for text/image input, 70c/million for audio input, 40c/million for output. Again, cheaper than GPT-4o mini.

I pushed a new LLM plugin release, llm-gemini 0.10, adding support for the three new models:

llm install -U llm-gemini
llm keys set gemini
# paste API key here
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash "impress me"
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05 "impress me"
llm -m gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 "impress me"

Here's the output for those three prompts.

I ran Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle through the three new models. Here are the results, cheapest to most expensive:

gemini-2.0-flash-lite-preview-02-05

gemini-2.0-flash

gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05

Full transcripts here.

I also ran the same prompt I tried with o3-mini the other day:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/simonw/datasette
cd datasette
files-to-prompt datasette -e py -c | \
  llm -m gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 \
  -s 'write extensive documentation for how the permissions system works, as markdown' \
  -o max_output_tokens 10000

Here's the result from that - you can compare that to o3-mini's result here.

# 5th February 2025, 4:37 pm / gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, llm-pricing, ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

o3-mini is really good at writing internal documentation. I wanted to refresh my knowledge of how the Datasette permissions system works today. I already have extensive hand-written documentation for that, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could derive any insights from running an LLM against the codebase.

o3-mini has an input limit of 200,000 tokens. I used LLM and my files-to-prompt tool to generate the documentation like this:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/simonw/datasette
cd datasette
files-to-prompt datasette -e py -c | \
  llm -m o3-mini -s \
  'write extensive documentation for how the permissions system works, as markdown'

The files-to-prompt command is fed the datasette subdirectory, which contains just the source code for the application - omitting tests (in tests/) and documentation (in docs/).

The -e py option causes it to only include files with a .py extension - skipping all of the HTML and JavaScript files in that hierarchy.

The -c option causes it to output Claude's XML-ish format - a format that works great with other LLMs too.

You can see the output of that command in this Gist.

Then I pipe that result into LLM, requesting the o3-mini OpenAI model and passing the following system prompt:

write extensive documentation for how the permissions system works, as markdown

Specifically requesting Markdown is important.

The prompt used 99,348 input tokens and produced 3,118 output tokens (320 of those were invisible reasoning tokens). That's a cost of 12.3 cents.

Honestly, the results are fantastic. I had to double-check that I hadn't accidentally fed in the documentation by mistake.

(It's possible that the model is picking up additional information about Datasette in its training set, but I've seen similar high quality results from other, newer libraries so I don't think that's a significant factor.)

In this case I already had extensive written documentation of my own, but this was still a useful refresher to help confirm that the code matched my mental model of how everything works.

Documentation of project internals as a category is notorious for going out of date. Having tricks like this to derive usable how-it-works documentation from existing codebases in just a few seconds and at a cost of a few cents is wildly valuable.

# 5th February 2025, 6:07 am / llm, openai, o3, ai, llms, datasette, generative-ai, documentation, ai-assisted-programming, inference-scaling

OpenAI reasoning models: Advice on prompting (via) OpenAI's documentation for their o1 and o3 "reasoning models" includes some interesting tips on how to best prompt them:

• Developer messages are the new system messages: Starting with o1-2024-12-17, reasoning models support developer messages rather than system messages, to align with the chain of command behavior described in the model spec.

This appears to be a purely aesthetic change made for consistency with their instruction hierarchy concept. As far as I can tell the old system prompts continue to work exactly as before - you're encouraged to use the new developer message type but it has no impact on what actually happens.

Since my LLM tool already bakes in a llm --system "system prompt" option which works across multiple different models from different providers I'm not going to rush to adopt this new language!

• Use delimiters for clarity: Use delimiters like markdown, XML tags, and section titles to clearly indicate distinct parts of the input, helping the model interpret different sections appropriately.

Anthropic have been encouraging XML-ish delimiters for a while (I say -ish because there's no requirement that the resulting prompt is valid XML). My files-to-prompt tool has a -c option which outputs Claude-style XML, and in my experiments this same option works great with o1 and o3 too:

git clone https://github.com/tursodatabase/limbo
cd limbo/bindings/python

files-to-prompt . -c | llm -m o3-mini \
  -o reasoning_effort high \
  --system 'Write a detailed README with extensive usage examples'

• Limit additional context in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): When providing additional context or documents, include only the most relevant information to prevent the model from overcomplicating its response.

This makes me thing that o1/o3 are not good models to implement RAG on at all - with RAG I like to be able to dump as much extra context into the prompt as possible and leave it to the models to figure out what's relevant.

• Try zero shot first, then few shot if needed: Reasoning models often don't need few-shot examples to produce good results, so try to write prompts without examples first. If you have more complex requirements for your desired output, it may help to include a few examples of inputs and desired outputs in your prompt. Just ensure that the examples align very closely with your prompt instructions, as discrepancies between the two may produce poor results.

Providing examples remains the single most powerful prompting tip I know, so it's interesting to see advice here to only switch to examples if zero-shot doesn't work out.

• Be very specific about your end goal: In your instructions, try to give very specific parameters for a successful response, and encourage the model to keep reasoning and iterating until it matches your success criteria.

This makes sense: reasoning models "think" until they reach a conclusion, so making the goal as unambiguous as possible leads to better results.

• Markdown formatting: Starting with o1-2024-12-17, reasoning models in the API will avoid generating responses with markdown formatting. To signal to the model when you do want markdown formatting in the response, include the string Formatting re-enabled on the first line of your developer message.

This one was a real shock to me! I noticed that o3-mini was outputting • characters instead of Markdown * bullets and initially thought that was a bug.

I first saw this while running this prompt against limbo/bindings/python using files-to-prompt:

git clone https://github.com/tursodatabase/limbo
cd limbo/bindings/python

files-to-prompt . -c | llm -m o3-mini \
  -o reasoning_effort high \
  --system 'Write a detailed README with extensive usage examples'

Here's the full result, which includes text like this (note the weird bullets):

Features
--------
• High‑performance, in‑process database engine written in Rust  
• SQLite‑compatible SQL interface  
• Standard Python DB‑API 2.0–style connection and cursor objects

I ran it again with this modified prompt:

Formatting re-enabled. Write a detailed README with extensive usage examples.

And this time got back proper Markdown, rendered in this Gist. That did a really good job, and included bulleted lists using this valid Markdown syntax instead:

- **`make test`**: Run tests using pytest.
- **`make lint`**: Run linters (via [ruff](https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff)).
- **`make check-requirements`**: Validate that the `requirements.txt` files are in sync with `pyproject.toml`.
- **`make compile-requirements`**: Compile the `requirements.txt` files using pip-tools.

(Using LLMs like this to get me off the ground with under-documented libraries is a trick I use several times a month.)

Update: OpenAI's Nikunj Handa:

we agree this is weird! fwiw, it’s a temporary thing we had to do for the existing o-series models. we’ll fix this in future releases so that you can go back to naturally prompting for markdown or no-markdown.

# 2nd February 2025, 8:56 pm / o1, openai, o3, markdown, ai, llms, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, inference-scaling, rag, ai-assisted-programming, documentation, limbo, llm

llm-anthropic. I've renamed my llm-claude-3 plugin to llm-anthropic, on the basis that Claude 4 will probably happen at some point so this is a better name for the plugin.

If you're a previous user of llm-claude-3 you can upgrade to the new plugin like this:

llm install -U llm-claude-3

This should remove the old plugin and install the new one, because the latest llm-claude-3 depends on llm-anthropic. Just installing llm-anthropic may leave you with both plugins installed at once.

There is one extra manual step you'll need to take during this upgrade: creating a new anthropic stored key with the same API token you previously stored under claude. You can do that like so:

llm keys set anthropic --value "$(llm keys get claude)"

I released llm-anthropic 0.12 yesterday with new features not previously included in llm-claude-3:

• Support for Claude's prefill feature, using the new -o prefill '{' option and the accompanying -o hide_prefill 1 option to prevent the prefill from being included in the output text. #2
• New -o stop_sequences '```' option for specifying one or more stop sequences. To specify multiple stop sequences pass a JSON array of strings :-o stop_sequences '["end", "stop"].
• Model options are now documented in the README.

If you install or upgrade llm-claude-3 you will now get llm-anthropic instead, thanks to a tiny package on PyPI which depends on the new plugin name. I created that with my pypi-rename cookiecutter template.

Here's the issue for the rename. I archived the llm-claude-3 repository on GitHub, and got to use the brand new PyPI archiving feature to archive the llm-claude-3 project on PyPI as well.

# 2nd February 2025, 6:17 am / llm, anthropic, claude, plugins, ai, pypi, llms, python, generative-ai

Mistral Small 3 (via) First model release of 2025 for French AI lab Mistral, who describe Mistral Small 3 as "a latency-optimized 24B-parameter model released under the Apache 2.0 license."

More notably, they claim the following:

Mistral Small 3 is competitive with larger models such as Llama 3.3 70B or Qwen 32B, and is an excellent open replacement for opaque proprietary models like GPT4o-mini. Mistral Small 3 is on par with Llama 3.3 70B instruct, while being more than 3x faster on the same hardware.

Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 32B are two of my favourite models to run on my laptop - that ~20GB size turns out to be a great trade-off between memory usage and model utility. It's exciting to see a new entrant into that weight class.

The license is important: previous Mistral Small models used their Mistral Research License, which prohibited commercial deployments unless you negotiate a commercial license with them. They appear to be moving away from that, at least for their core models:

We’re renewing our commitment to using Apache 2.0 license for our general purpose models, as we progressively move away from MRL-licensed models. As with Mistral Small 3, model weights will be available to download and deploy locally, and free to modify and use in any capacity. […] Enterprises and developers that need specialized capabilities (increased speed and context, domain specific knowledge, task-specific models like code completion) can count on additional commercial models complementing what we contribute to the community.

Despite being called Mistral Small 3, this appears to be the fourth release of a model under that label. The Mistral API calls this one mistral-small-2501 - previous model IDs were mistral-small-2312, mistral-small-2402 and mistral-small-2409.

I've updated the llm-mistral plugin for talking directly to Mistral's La Plateforme API:

llm install -U llm-mistral
llm keys set mistral
# Paste key here
llm -m mistral/mistral-small-latest "tell me a joke about a badger and a puffin"

Sure, here's a light-hearted joke for you:

Why did the badger bring a puffin to the party?

Because he heard puffins make great party 'Puffins'!

(That's a play on the word "puffins" and the phrase "party people.")

API pricing is $0.10/million tokens of input, $0.30/million tokens of output - half the price of the previous Mistral Small API model ($0.20/$0.60). for comparison, GPT-4o mini is $0.15/$0.60.

Mistral also ensured that the new model was available on Ollama in time for their release announcement.

You can pull the model like this (fetching 14GB):

ollama run mistral-small:24b

The llm-ollama plugin will then let you prompt it like so:

llm install llm-ollama
llm -m mistral-small:24b "say hi"

# 30th January 2025, 3:36 pm / open-source, mistral, llm, ollama, generative-ai, ai, llms, llm-pricing

Qwen2.5-1M: Deploy Your Own Qwen with Context Length up to 1M Tokens (via) Very significant new release from Alibaba's Qwen team. Their openly licensed (sometimes Apache 2, sometimes Qwen license, I've had trouble keeping up) Qwen 2.5 LLM previously had an input token limit of 128,000 tokens. This new model increases that to 1 million, using a new technique called Dual Chunk Attention, first described in this paper from February 2024.

They've released two models on Hugging Face: Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M, both requiring CUDA and both under an Apache 2.0 license.

You'll need a lot of VRAM to run them at their full capacity:

VRAM Requirement for processing 1 million-token sequences:

• Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M: At least 120GB VRAM (total across GPUs).
• Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M: At least 320GB VRAM (total across GPUs).

If your GPUs do not have sufficient VRAM, you can still use Qwen2.5-1M models for shorter tasks.

Qwen recommend using their custom fork of vLLM to serve the models:

You can also use the previous framework that supports Qwen2.5 for inference, but accuracy degradation may occur for sequences exceeding 262,144 tokens.

GGUF quantized versions of the models are already starting to show up. LM Studio's "official model curator" Bartowski published lmstudio-community/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M-GGUF and lmstudio-community/Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M-GGUF - sizes range from 4.09GB to 8.1GB for the 7B model and 7.92GB to 15.7GB for the 14B.

These might not work well yet with the full context lengths as the underlying llama.cpp library may need some changes.

I tried running the 8.1GB 7B model using Ollama on my Mac like this:

ollama run hf.co/lmstudio-community/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M-GGUF:Q8_0

Then with LLM:

llm install llm-ollama
llm models -q qwen # To search for the model ID
# I set a shorter q1m alias:
llm aliases set q1m hf.co/lmstudio-community/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M-GGUF:Q8_0

I tried piping a large prompt in using files-to-prompt like this:

files-to-prompt ~/Dropbox/Development/llm -e py -c | llm -m q1m 'describe this codebase in detail'

That should give me every Python file in my llm project. Piping that through ttok first told me this was 63,014 OpenAI tokens, I expect that count is similar for Qwen.

The result was disappointing: it appeared to describe just the last Python file that stream. Then I noticed the token usage report:

2,048 input, 999 output

This suggests to me that something's not working right here - maybe the Ollama hosting framework is truncating the input, or maybe there's a problem with the GGUF I'm using?

I'll update this post when I figure out how to run longer prompts through the new Qwen model using GGUF weights on a Mac.

Update: It turns out Ollama has a num_ctx option which defaults to 2048, affecting the input context length. I tried this:

files-to-prompt \
  ~/Dropbox/Development/llm \
  -e py -c | \
llm -m q1m 'describe this codebase in detail' \
 -o num_ctx 80000

But I quickly ran out of RAM (I have 64GB but a lot of that was in use already) and hit Ctrl+C to avoid crashing my computer. I need to experiment a bit to figure out how much RAM is used for what context size.

Awni Hannun shared tips for running mlx-community/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M-4bit using MLX, which should work for up to 250,000 tokens. They ran 120,000 tokens and reported:

• Peak RAM for prompt filling was 22GB
• Peak RAM for generation 12GB
• Prompt filling took 350 seconds on an M2 Ultra
• Generation ran at 31 tokens-per-second on M2 Ultra

# 26th January 2025, 6:54 pm / llms, ai, qwen, generative-ai, llm, ollama, long-context, llama-cpp

LLM 0.20. New release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library. A bunch of accumulated fixes and features since the start of December, most notably:

• Support for OpenAI's o1 model - a significant upgrade from o1-preview given its 200,000 input and 100,000 output tokens (o1-preview was 128,000/32,768). #676
• Support for the gpt-4o-audio-preview and gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview models, which can accept audio input: llm -m gpt-4o-audio-preview -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelican-joke-request.mp3 #677
• A new llm -x/--extract option which extracts and returns the contents of the first fenced code block in the response. This is useful for prompts that generate code. #681
• A new llm models -q 'search' option for searching available models - useful if you've installed a lot of plugins. Searches are case insensitive. #700

# 23rd January 2025, 4:55 am / llm, projects, generative-ai, annotated-release-notes, ai, llms, openai, o1

llm-gemini 0.9. This new release of my llm-gemini plugin adds support for two new experimental models:

• learnlm-1.5-pro-experimental is "an experimental task-specific model that has been trained to align with learning science principles when following system instructions for teaching and learning use cases" - more here.

• gemini-2.0-flash-thinking-exp-01-21 is a brand new version of the Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model released today:

  Latest version also includes code execution, a 1M token content window & a reduced likelihood of thought-answer contradictions.

The most exciting new feature though is support for Google search grounding, where some Gemini models can execute Google searches as part of answering a prompt. This feature can be enabled using the new -o google_search 1 option.

# 22nd January 2025, 4:32 am / gemini, llm, projects, generative-ai, inference-scaling, ai, llms

Codestral 25.01 (via) Brand new code-focused model from Mistral. Unlike the first Codestral this one isn't (yet) available as open weights. The model has a 256k token context - a new record for Mistral.

The new model scored an impressive joint first place with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Deepseek V2.5 (FIM) on the Copilot Arena leaderboard.

Chatbot Arena announced Copilot Arena on 12th November 2024. The leaderboard is driven by results gathered through their Copilot Arena VS Code extensions, which provides users with free access to models in exchange for logged usage data plus their votes as to which of two models returns the most useful completion.

So far the only other independent benchmark result I've seen is for the Aider Polyglot test. This was less impressive:

Codestral 25.01 scored 11% on the aider polyglot benchmark.

62% o1 (high)
48% DeepSeek V3
16% Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instruct
11% Codestral 25.01
4% gpt-4o-mini

The new model can be accessed via my llm-mistral plugin using the codestral alias (which maps to codestral-latest on La Plateforme):

llm install llm-mistral
llm keys set mistral
# Paste Mistral API key here
llm -m codestral "JavaScript to reverse an array"

# 13th January 2025, 9:33 pm / mistral, llm, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, aider, evals

microsoft/phi-4. Here's the official release of Microsoft's Phi-4 LLM, now officially under an MIT license.

A few weeks ago I covered the earlier unofficial versions, where I talked about how the model used synthetic training data in some really interesting ways.

It benchmarks favorably compared to GPT-4o, suggesting this is yet another example of a GPT-4 class model that can run on a good laptop.

The model already has several available community quantizations. I ran the mlx-community/phi-4-4bit one (a 7.7GB download) using mlx-llm like this:

uv run --with 'numpy<2' --with mlx-lm python -c '
from mlx_lm import load, generate

model, tokenizer = load("mlx-community/phi-4-4bit")

prompt = "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

if tokenizer.chat_template is not None:
    messages = [{"role": "user", "content": prompt}]
    prompt = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
        messages, add_generation_prompt=True
    )

response = generate(model, tokenizer, prompt=prompt, verbose=True, max_tokens=2048)
print(response)'

Here's what I got back.

Update: The model is now available via Ollama, so you can fetch a 9.1GB model file using ollama run phi4, after which it becomes available via the llm-ollama plugin.

# 8th January 2025, 5:57 pm / phi, generative-ai, ai, microsoft, llms, uv, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm, ollama

q and qv zsh functions for asking questions of websites and YouTube videos with LLM (via) Spotted these in David Gasquez's zshrc dotfiles: two shell functions that use my LLM tool to answer questions about a website or YouTube video.

Here's how to ask a question of a website:

q https://simonwillison.net/ 'What has Simon written about recently?'

I got back:

Recently, Simon Willison has written about various topics including:

1. Building Python Tools - Exploring one-shot applications using Claude and dependency management with uv.
2. Modern Java Usage - Discussing recent developments in Java that simplify coding.
3. GitHub Copilot Updates - New free tier and features in GitHub Copilot for Vue and VS Code.
4. AI Engagement on Bluesky - Investigating the use of bots to create artificially polite disagreements.
5. OpenAI WebRTC Audio - Demonstrating a new API for real-time audio conversation with models.

It works by constructing a Jina Reader URL to convert that URL to Markdown, then piping that content into LLM along with the question.

The YouTube one is even more fun:

qv 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRuLgar5XZw' 'what does Simon say about open source?'

It said (about this 72 minute video):

Simon emphasizes that open source has significantly increased productivity in software development. He points out that before open source, developers often had to recreate existing solutions or purchase proprietary software, which often limited customization. The availability of open source projects has made it easier to find and utilize existing code, which he believes is one of the primary reasons for more efficient software development today.

The secret sauce behind that one is the way it uses yt-dlp to extract just the subtitles for the video:

local subtitle_url=$(yt-dlp -q --skip-download --convert-subs srt --write-sub --sub-langs "en" --write-auto-sub --print "requested_subtitles.en.url" "$url")
local content=$(curl -s "$subtitle_url" | sed '/^$/d' | grep -v '^[0-9]*$' | grep -v '\-->' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' | tr '\n' ' ')

That first line retrieves a URL to the subtitles in WEBVTT format - I saved a copy of that here. The second line then uses curl to fetch them, then sed and grep to remove the timestamp information, producing this.

# 19th December 2024, 3:42 pm / youtube, llm, jina, zsh, generative-ai, ai, llms

Phi-4 Technical Report (via) Phi-4 is the latest LLM from Microsoft Research. It has 14B parameters and claims to be a big leap forward in the overall Phi series. From Introducing Phi-4: Microsoft’s Newest Small Language Model Specializing in Complex Reasoning:

Phi-4 outperforms comparable and larger models on math related reasoning due to advancements throughout the processes, including the use of high-quality synthetic datasets, curation of high-quality organic data, and post-training innovations. Phi-4 continues to push the frontier of size vs quality.

The model is currently available via Azure AI Foundry. I couldn't figure out how to access it there, but Microsoft are planning to release it via Hugging Face in the next few days. It's not yet clear what license they'll use - hopefully MIT, as used by the previous models in the series.

In the meantime, unofficial GGUF versions have shown up on Hugging Face already. I got one of the matteogeniaccio/phi-4 GGUFs working with my LLM tool and llm-gguf plugin like this:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model https://huggingface.co/matteogeniaccio/phi-4/resolve/main/phi-4-Q4_K_M.gguf
llm chat -m gguf/phi-4-Q4_K_M

This downloaded a 8.4GB model file. Here are some initial logged transcripts I gathered from playing around with the model.

An interesting detail I spotted on the Azure AI Foundry page is this:

Limited Scope for Code: Majority of phi-4 training data is based in Python and uses common packages such as typing, math, random, collections, datetime, itertools. If the model generates Python scripts that utilize other packages or scripts in other languages, we strongly recommend users manually verify all API uses.

This leads into the most interesting thing about this model: the way it was trained on synthetic data. The technical report has a lot of detail about this, including this note about why synthetic data can provide better guidance to a model:

Synthetic data as a substantial component of pretraining is becoming increasingly common, and the Phi series of models has consistently emphasized the importance of synthetic data. Rather than serving as a cheap substitute for organic data, synthetic data has several direct advantages over organic data.

Structured and Gradual Learning. In organic datasets, the relationship between tokens is often complex and indirect. Many reasoning steps may be required to connect the current token to the next, making it challenging for the model to learn effectively from next-token prediction. By contrast, each token generated by a language model is by definition predicted by the preceding tokens, making it easier for a model to follow the resulting reasoning patterns.

And this section about their approach for generating that data:

Our approach to generating synthetic data for phi-4 is guided by the following principles:

1. Diversity: The data should comprehensively cover subtopics and skills within each domain. This requires curating diverse seeds from organic sources.
2. Nuance and Complexity: Effective training requires nuanced, non-trivial examples that reflect the complexity and the richness of the domain. Data must go beyond basics to include edge cases and advanced examples.
3. Accuracy: Code should execute correctly, proofs should be valid, and explanations should adhere to established knowledge, etc.
4. Chain-of-Thought: Data should encourage systematic reasoning, teaching the model various approaches to the problems in a step-by-step manner. [...]

We created 50 broad types of synthetic datasets, each one relying on a different set of seeds and different multi-stage prompting procedure, spanning an array of topics, skills, and natures of interaction, accumulating to a total of about 400B unweighted tokens. [...]

Question Datasets: A large set of questions was collected from websites, forums, and Q&A platforms. These questions were then filtered using a plurality-based technique to balance difficulty. Specifically, we generated multiple independent answers for each question and applied majority voting to assess the consistency of responses. We discarded questions where all answers agreed (indicating the question was too easy) or where answers were entirely inconsistent (indicating the question was too difficult or ambiguous). [...]

Creating Question-Answer pairs from Diverse Sources: Another technique we use for seed curation involves leveraging language models to extract question-answer pairs from organic sources such as books, scientific papers, and code.

# 15th December 2024, 11:58 pm / llm, phi, generative-ai, training-data, ai, microsoft, llms, ai-assisted-programming, python

Introducing Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust (via) This looks absurdly ambitious:

Our goal is to build a reimplementation of SQLite from scratch, fully compatible at the language and file format level, with the same or higher reliability SQLite is known for, but with full memory safety and on a new, modern architecture.

The Turso team behind it have been maintaining their libSQL fork for two years now, so they're well equipped to take on a challenge of this magnitude.

SQLite is justifiably famous for its meticulous approach to testing. Limbo plans to take an entirely different approach based on "Deterministic Simulation Testing" - a modern technique pioneered by FoundationDB and now spearheaded by Antithesis, the company Turso have been working with on their previous testing projects.

Another bold claim (emphasis mine):

We have both added DST facilities to the core of the database, and partnered with Antithesis to achieve a level of reliability in the database that lives up to SQLite’s reputation.

[...] With DST, we believe we can achieve an even higher degree of robustness than SQLite, since it is easier to simulate unlikely scenarios in a simulator, test years of execution with different event orderings, and upon finding issues, reproduce them 100% reliably.

The two most interesting features that Limbo is planning to offer are first-party WASM support and fully asynchronous I/O:

SQLite itself has a synchronous interface, meaning driver authors who want asynchronous behavior need to have the extra complication of using helper threads. Because SQLite queries tend to be fast, since no network round trips are involved, a lot of those drivers just settle for a synchronous interface. [...]

Limbo is designed to be asynchronous from the ground up. It extends sqlite3_step, the main entry point API to SQLite, to be asynchronous, allowing it to return to the caller if data is not ready to consume immediately.

Datasette provides an async API for executing SQLite queries which is backed by all manner of complex thread management - I would be very interested in a native asyncio Python library for talking to SQLite database files.

I successfully tried out Limbo's Python bindings against a demo SQLite test database using uv like this:

uv run --with pylimbo python
>>> import limbo
>>> conn = limbo.connect("/tmp/demo.db")
>>> cursor = conn.cursor()
>>> print(cursor.execute("select * from foo").fetchall())

It crashed when I tried against a more complex SQLite database that included SQLite FTS tables.

The Python bindings aren't yet documented, so I piped them through LLM and had the new google-exp-1206 model write this initial documentation for me:

files-to-prompt limbo/bindings/python -c | llm -m gemini-exp-1206 -s 'write extensive usage documentation in markdown, including realistic usage examples'

# 10th December 2024, 7:25 pm / rust, sqlite, uv, open-source, python, llm, ai-assisted-programming, documentation, limbo

llm-openrouter 0.3. New release of my llm-openrouter plugin, which allows LLM to access models hosted by OpenRouter.

Quoting the release notes:

• Enable image attachments for models that support images. Thanks, Adam Montgomery. #12
• Provide async model access. #15
• Fix documentation to list correct LLM_OPENROUTER_KEY environment variable. #10

# 8th December 2024, 11:56 pm / llm, releases, plugins, generative-ai, ai, llms

New Gemini model: gemini-exp-1206. Google's Jeff Dean:

Today’s the one year anniversary of our first Gemini model releases! And it’s never looked better.

Check out our newest release, Gemini-exp-1206, in Google AI Studio and the Gemini API!

I upgraded my llm-gemini plugin to support the new model and released it as version 0.6 - you can install or upgrade it like this:

llm install -U llm-gemini

Running my SVG pelican on a bicycle test prompt:

llm -m gemini-exp-1206 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

Provided this result, which is the best I've seen from any model:

Here's the full output - I enjoyed these two pieces of commentary from the model:

<polygon>: Shapes the distinctive pelican beak, with an added line for the lower mandible.
[...]
transform="translate(50, 30)": This attribute on the pelican's <g> tag moves the entire pelican group 50 units to the right and 30 units down, positioning it correctly on the bicycle.

The new model is also currently in top place on the Chatbot Arena.

Update: a delightful bonus, here's what I got from the follow-up prompt:

llm -c "now animate it"

Transcript here.

# 6th December 2024, 6:05 pm / gemini, llm, ai, llms, svg, releases, google, generative-ai, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

datasette-enrichments-llm. Today's new alpha release is datasette-enrichments-llm, a plugin for Datasette 1.0a+ that provides an enrichment that lets you run prompts against data from one or more column and store the result in another column.

So far it's a light re-implementation of the existing datasette-enrichments-gpt plugin, now using the new llm.get_async_models() method to allow users to select any async-enabled model that has been registered by a plugin - so currently any of the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or Mistral via their respective plugins.

Still plenty to do on this one. Next step is to integrate it with datasette-llm-usage and use it to drive a design-complete stable version of that.

# 5th December 2024, 11:46 pm / llm, plugins, ai, llms, enrichments, releases, datasette, generative-ai, projects