Tag Archives: Simon Willison

Researchers claim breakthrough in fight against AI’s frustrating security hole

To understand CaMeL, you need to understand that prompt injections happen when AI systems can’t distinguish between legitimate user commands and malicious instructions hidden in content they’re processing. Willison often says that the “original sin” of LLMs is that trusted prompts from the user and untrusted text from emails, webpages, or other sources are concatenated… Read More »

Meta’s surprise Llama 4 drop exposes the gap between AI ambition and reality

Meta constructed the Llama 4 models using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, which is one way around the limitations of running huge AI models. Think of MoE like having a large team of specialized workers; instead of everyone working on every task, only the relevant specialists activate for a specific job. For example, Llama 4 Maverick… Read More »

Anthropic’s new AI search feature digs through the web for answers

Caution over citations and sources Claude users should be warned that large language models (LLMs) like those that power Claude are notorious for sneaking in plausible-sounding confabulated sources. A recent survey of citation accuracy by LLM-based web search assistants showed a 60 percent error rate. That particular study did not include Anthropic’s new search feature… Read More »

Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts

“The biggest [drawback] is that they are probabilistic prediction machines and will get it wrong in ways that aren’t just ‘that’s the wrong word’,” Willis explains. “LLMs will sometimes skip a line in larger documents where the layout repeats itself, I’ve found, where OCR isn’t likely to do that.” AI researcher and data journalist Simon… Read More »

Ars Live: Our first encounter with manipulative AI

While Bing Chat’s unhinged nature was caused in part by how Microsoft defined the “personality” of Sydney in the system prompt (and unintended side-effects of its architecture with regard to conversation length), Ars Technica’s saga with the chatbot began when someone discovered how to reveal Sydney’s instructions via prompt injection, which Ars Technica then published.… Read More »

Cheap AI “video scraping” can now extract data from any screen recording

Video scraping is just one of many new tricks possible when the latest large language models (LLMs), such as Google’s Gemini and GPT-4o, are actually “multimodal” models, allowing audio, video, image, and text input. These models translate any multimedia input into tokens (chunks of data), which they use to make predictions about which tokens should… Read More »

Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model

reader comments 56 OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is “thinking.” Since the company launched its “Strawberry” AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries to probe… Read More »

Zoom CEO envisions AI deepfakes attending meetings in your place

reader comments 164 Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has a vision for the future of work: sending your AI-powered digital twin to attend meetings on your behalf. In an interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel published Monday, Yuan shared his plans for Zoom to become an “AI-first company,” using AI to automate tasks and reduce the… Read More »

Before launching, GPT-4o broke records on chatbot leaderboard under a secret name

Getty Images reader comments 31 On Monday, OpenAI employee William Fedus confirmed on X that a mysterious chat-topping AI chatbot known as “gpt-chatbot” that had been undergoing testing on LMSYS’s Chatbot Arena and frustrating experts was, in fact, OpenAI’s newly announced GPT-4o AI model. He also revealed that GPT-4o had topped the Chatbot Arena leaderboard,… Read More »

Mysterious “gpt2-chatbot” AI model appears suddenly, confuses experts

reader comments 25 On Sunday, word began to spread on social media about a new mystery chatbot named “gpt2-chatbot” that appeared in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Some people speculate that it may be a secret test version of OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 large language model (LLM). The paid version of ChatGPT is currently powered… Read More »