Simon Willison

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good.

Simon Willison
2d ago

Quoting Jeremy Morrell

My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries.

Google AI Blog
Feb 21, 2024

Advances in private training for production on-device language models

Posted by Zheng Xu, Research Scientist, and Yanxiang Zhang, Software Engineer, Google Language models (LMs) trained to predict the next word given input text are the key technology for many applications [ 1 , 2 ]. In Gboard , LMs are used to improve users’ typing experience by supporting features like next word prediction (NWP), Smart Compose , smart completion and suggestion , slide to type , and proofread .

By Google AI
Simon Willison
Aug 10

Quoting OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6)

The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already.

Google AI Blog
Mar 14, 2024

Cappy: Outperforming and boosting large multi-task language models with a small scorer

Posted by Yun Zhu and Lijuan Liu, Software Engineers, Google Research Large language model (LLM) advancements have led to a new paradigm that unifies various natural language processing (NLP) tasks within an instruction-following framework. This paradigm is exemplified by recent multi-task LLMs, such as T0 , FLAN , and OPT-IML .

By Google AI
Simon Willison
9h ago

Stop Making TUIs

Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March , and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.

Google AI Blog
Mar 11, 2024

Chain-of-table: Evolving tables in the reasoning chain for table understanding

Posted by Zilong Wang, Student Researcher, and Chen-Yu Lee, Research Scientist, Cloud AI Team People use tables every day to organize and interpret complex information in a structured, easily accessible format. Due to the ubiquity of such tables, reasoning over tabular data has long been a central topic in natural language processing (NLP).

By Google AI