Simon Willison on my-talks

88 posts tagged “my-talks”

Talks I've given at various conferences around the world.

2025

The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October 2023 and June 2024. My topic this time was “The last six months in LLMs”—originally planned as the last year, but so much has happened that I had to reduce my scope!

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8:42 pm / 6th June 2025 / speaking, my-talks, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, annotated-talks, mistral, gemini, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, deepseek, lethal-trifecta

Talking AI and jobs with Natasha Zouves for News Nation

I was interviewed by News Nation’s Natasha Zouves about the very complicated topic of how we should think about AI in terms of threatening our jobs and careers. I previously talked with Natasha two years ago about Microsoft Bing.

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1:45 pm / 30th May 2025 / interviews, speaking, my-talks, ai, generative-ai, llms, podcast-appearances, ai-ethics, claude-4

Building software on top of Large Language Models

I presented a three hour workshop at PyCon US yesterday titled Building software on top of Large Language Models. The goal of the workshop was to give participants everything they needed to get started writing code that makes use of LLMs.

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12:25 pm / 15th May 2025 / pycon, speaking, my-talks, ai, openai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, embeddings, llm, anthropic, annotated-talks, gemini, vision-llms, llm-tool-use, llm-pricing, llm-reasoning, long-context

What’s new in the world of LLMs, for NICAR 2025

I presented two sessions at the NICAR 2025 data journalism conference this year. The first was this one based on my review of LLMs in 2024, extended by several months to cover everything that’s happened in 2025 so far. The second was a workshop on Cutting-edge web scraping techniques, which I’ve written up separately.

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11:19 pm / 8th March 2025 / data-journalism, speaking, my-talks, ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, annotated-talks, gemini, nicar, vision-llms, chatbot-arena

2024

Notes from Bing Chat—Our First Encounter With Manipulative AI

I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people.

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10:41 pm / 19th November 2024 / arstechnica, bing, ethics, microsoft, podcasts, my-talks, ai, openai, generative-ai, gpt-4, llms, benj-edwards, podcast-appearances, ai-ethics, ai-assisted-search, ai-personality

Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024

I gave an invited keynote at PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh this year. My goal was to say some interesting things about AI—specifically about Large Language Models—both to help catch people up who may not have been paying close attention, but also to give people who were paying close attention some new things to think about.

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4:59 am / 14th July 2024 / pycon, python, my-talks, ai, generative-ai, llms, annotated-talks, chatbot-arena

Open challenges for AI engineering

I gave the opening keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair yesterday. I was a late addition to the schedule: OpenAI pulled out of their slot at the last minute, and I was invited to put together a 20 minute talk with just under 24 hours notice!

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4:35 pm / 27th June 2024 / speaking, my-talks, dropbox, ai, slack, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, annotated-talks, slop, exfiltration-attacks, chatbot-arena

Building search-based RAG using Claude, Datasette and Val Town

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique for adding extra “knowledge” to systems built on LLMs, allowing them to answer questions against custom information not included in their training data. A common way to implement this is to take a question from a user, translate that into a set of search queries, run those against a search engine and then feed the results back into the LLM to generate an answer.

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8:44 pm / 21st June 2024 / projects, my-talks, ai, datasette, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, anthropic, claude, annotated-talks, val-town, rag, claude-artifacts, claude-3-5-sonnet, steve-krouse, ai-assisted-search

Language models on the command-line

I gave a talk about accessing Large Language Models from the command-line last week as part of the Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists six week long online conference. The talk focused on my LLM Python command-line utility and ways you can use it (and its plugins) to explore LLMs and use them for useful tasks.

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4:44 pm / 17th June 2024 / cli, projects, my-talks, ai, datasette, openai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, llm, anthropic, annotated-talks, llamafile, ollama, files-to-prompt

AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.

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9:04 pm / 17th April 2024 / data-journalism, journalism, projects, my-talks, ai, datasette, datasette-cloud, generative-ai, llms, llm, annotated-talks, code-interpreter, enrichments, vision-llms, structured-extraction, coding-agents

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”.

# 29th February 2024, 9:04 pm / python, speaking, my-talks, ai, whisper, llms, gemini

2023

Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

I presented a ten minute segment at GitHub Universe on Wednesday, ambitiously titled Financial sustainability for open source projects.

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10:48 pm / 10th November 2023 / github, open-source, my-talks, datasette, datasette-cloud, annotated-talks

Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon.

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1:36 pm / 23rd October 2023 / my-talks, ai, generative-ai, embeddings, llm, annotated-talks, rag, clip

Open questions for AI engineering

Last week I gave the closing keynote at the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco. I was asked by the organizers to both summarize the conference, summarize the last year of activity in the space and give the audience something to think about by posing some open questions for them to take home.

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2:18 pm / 17th October 2023 / my-talks, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, annotated-talks, code-interpreter, coding-agents

Making Large Language Models work for you

I gave an invited keynote at WordCamp 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland on Friday.

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2:35 pm / 27th August 2023 / speaking, my-talks, wordpress, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, annotated-talks, code-interpreter, rag, coding-agents

How I make annotated presentations

Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.

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5:15 pm / 6th August 2023 / alt-text, ocr, projects, speaking, my-talks, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, anthropic, claude, annotated-talks

Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette

The principle theme for the past few weeks has been plugins.

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12:32 am / 5th August 2023 / cli, plugins, projects, my-talks, datasette, weeknotes, sqlite-utils, llm

Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Llama 2.

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2:51 pm / 3rd August 2023 / ethics, python, my-talks, ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, llm, anthropic, claude, annotated-talks, code-interpreter, ai-ethics, coding-agents

Data analysis with SQLite and Python. I turned my 2hr45m workshop from PyCon into the latest official tutorial on the Datasette website. It includes an extensive handout which should be useful independently of the video itself.

# 2nd July 2023, 4:48 pm / python, speaking, sqlite, my-talks, datasette

When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth (via) 15 years ago I put together a talk about the history of Zeppelins which I presented a bunch of different times in various different configurations. As far as I know there are no existing videos of it, but I found an MP3 recording today and decided to splice it together with the slides to create a video of the 6m47s version I gave at the Skillswap on Speed lightning talks event in Brighton on the 28th October 2008.

Notes on how I edited the video together using iMovie in the via link.

# 15th June 2023, 8:16 pm / my-talks, zeppelins

Big Opportunities in Small Data

I gave an invited keynote at Citus Con 2023, the PostgreSQL conference. Below is the abstract, video, slides and links from the presentation.

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3:06 am / 8th May 2023 / postgresql, sqlite, my-talks, datasette, small-data

Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).

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8:22 pm / 2nd May 2023 / security, my-talks, ai, prompt-engineering, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, annotated-talks, exfiltration-attacks

Data analysis with SQLite and Python for PyCon 2023

I’m at PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake City this week.

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5:03 pm / 20th April 2023 / pycon, python, speaking, sqlite, my-talks, datasette, sqlite-utils, datasette-lite

Working in public

I participated in a panel discussion this week for path to Citus Con, a series of Discord audio events that are happening in the run up to the Citus Con 2023 later this month.

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12:36 am / 8th April 2023 / open-source, podcasts, speaking, my-talks, podcast-appearances

How to Wrap Our Heads Around These New Shockingly Fluent Chatbots. I was a guest on KQED Forum this morning, a live radio documentary and call-in show hosted by Alexis Madrigal. Ted Chiang and Claire Leibowicz were the other guests: we talked about ChatGPT and and the new generation of AI-powered tools.

# 3rd March 2023, 4:59 am / radio, my-talks, ai, gpt-3, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, ted-chiang

I talked about Bing and tried to explain language models on live TV!

Yesterday evening I was interviewed by Natasha Zouves on NewsNation, on live TV (over Zoom).

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4:53 pm / 19th February 2023 / bing, interviews, speaking, my-talks, ai, generative-ai, llms

2022

Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder

I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests”.

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3:47 pm / 26th November 2022 / djangocon, documentation, productivity, my-talks, testing, annotated-talks, github-issues

Weeknotes: DjangoCon, SQLite in Django, datasette-gunicorn

I spent most of this week at DjangoCon in San Diego—my first outside-of-the-Bay-Area conference since the before-times.

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7:58 pm / 23rd October 2022 / django, djangocon, projects, sqlite, my-talks, gunicorn, datasette, weeknotes, shot-scraper, carlton-gibson

SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite

Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.

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10:01 pm / 23rd March 2022 / sqlite, my-talks, twitter, datasette, litestream, ben-johnson, geoffrey-litt

2021

Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

My main project this week was a 90 minute workshop I delivered about Git scraping at Coda.Br 2021, a Brazilian data journalism conference, on Friday. This inspired the creation of a brand new tool, git-history, plus smaller improvements to a range of other projects.

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4:10 am / 15th November 2021 / aws, projects, s3, my-talks, teaching, datasette, weeknotes, git-scraping, sqlite-utils, git-history, s3-credentials

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