Essential reading from Simon Willison's talk on Large Language Models including what they are , how they work, how to use them, and very importantly, personal AI ethics β how should we feel about using AI, and how to use it responsibly.
The talk provides a wholistic overview of LLMs like GPT-3 and ChatGPT, tracing their development. It covered how LLMs work by predicting the next word, their training on vast datasets including copyrighted material, emerging generative techniques, and code generation.
Main Arguments:
LLMs like GPT-3 and ChatGPT predict next words with fluency by training on vast datasets
LLMs raise personal ethical dilemmas around blindly publishing AI-generated content vs. understanding the outputs
LLM training data includes copyrighted books, raising legal concerns shown by lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta
Openly licensed models like LLaMA and LLaMA 2 accelerate open innovation