Notices by Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net), page 5

I think GitHub may have the best URL design of any website I've ever seen - it's SO clean and intuitive, I must type in URLs to different things on GitHub dozens of times a day

It's one of those days again, where everyone releases exciting stuff all at once

Google Gemini 1.5 has a 1 million token context limit https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-next-generation-model-february-2024/

Observable Framework reinvents Observable notebooks as a static publishing system for visualization dashboards https://observablehq.com/blog/observable-2-0

And now OpenAI reveal initial results from Sora, their astonishing (and somewhat dystopian) text to video model: https://openai.com/sora

I am an expert prompt engineer

(This genuinely worked)

To celebrate #SuperbOwlSunday your annual reminder that @natbat and I made a most excellent website a few years ago that helps you find your nearest owls https://www.owlsnearme.com/

Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Feb/9/weeknotes/

@timbray for me that is a pretty convincing argument to stay clear of assuming the email is a stable key

I'm quoted in this @arstechnica piece about that recent "AI generated" George Carlin special

I don't think it was written by AI

I found the whole thing grossly disrespectful, but I do slightly appreciate the meta-joke here that the AI generated text is fake and was actually written by humans

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/did-an-ai-write-that-hour-long-george-carlin-special-im-not-convinced/

The best management advice I ever got is to try and figure out what good management looks like and then put on a performance - try and act like a good manager, go through all of the required motions

Because it turns out imitating a good manager and actually being a good manager are mostly the same thing

(I think about this sometimes when I encounter debates about whether or not LLMs can reason about or understand content)

@pieist yes, absolutely - I think the thing that's not OK here is fiercely arguing that people who call LLMs AI shouldn't do that to the point of derailing more useful conversations

@glyph @carlana thats exactly it - I've been half-heartedly fighting the LLM hairsplitting fight for most of the last year and I got tired of it - it didn't feel like it was gaining anything meaningful

@jimgar @serapath that observation that the term AI is polysemic just expanded my understanding of the core issue here substantially! Thanks for that

@serapath I think refusing to accept the word at this point actively hurts our ability to have important conversations about it

Is there an argument that refusing to use the word Artificial Intelligence can have a positive overall impact on conversations and understanding? I'm open to hearing one!

@serapath@gamedev.place That's the exact position I'm arguing against

Yes, it's not "intelligent" like in science fiction - but we need to educate people that science fiction isn't real, not throw away a whole academic discipline and pick a different word!

Image recognition is part of AI too

@serapath Which version of AI do you think doesn't help anyone? It's a pretty broad field!

Short version: "I’m going to embrace the term Artificial Intelligence and trust my readers to understand what I mean without assuming I’m talking about Skynet."

@carlana @glyph I love that idea that layman have more confidence over the definition than practitioners do!

It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence: I wrote about how people really love objecting to the term "AI" to describe LLMs and suchlike because those things aren't actually "intelligent" - but the term AI has been used to describe exactly this kind of research since 1955, and arguing otherwise at this point isn't a helpful contribution to the discussion.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/call-it-ai/

@evan Wow, recorded 17 years ago! https://simonwillison.net/2006/Dec/22/screencast/

Classic example of AI-assisted development encouraging me to build things I wouldn't have built without it... I just added tag cloud summaries to my blog's by-year archive pages, e.g. https://simonwillison.net/2007/

I'd already implemented tag clouds as part of my Django SQL Dashboard project, and I had a JSON API that could return the data... so I pasted my old code into ChatGPT along with an example of the JSON and told it to rewrite it to fetch from the new API endpoint: https://chat.openai.com/share/5bbde5a8-0c5b-4bfa-93db-2f83a0bc8846

At a rough guess it would have taken me ~30 minutes to do this without any AI assistance (since it was mainly adapting code I'd written in the past), but honestly in this case I think those 10 minutes made the difference between shipping this and deciding I should work on something else