Nils Durner's Blog Ahas, Breadcrumbs, Coding Epiphanies

Anthropic Computer Use: ideas for Agents

Anthropic have published the “Computer Use Demo” in their Quickstarts Github repository. The approach taken is fundametally different from my Aileen project: it’s not confined to a browser controlled through Selenium and very tight guardrails, but instead controls a full GNU/Linux desktop - which is separate from the user desktop session. On the... Read more...

Questioning the 'LLMs Can't Reason' Claim

A recent paper from Apple about reasoning deficits has been widely reposted as “LLMs Can’t Reason”. The study claims to demonstrate significant limitations in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Gary Marcus, author of a “Forbes 7 Must Read Books in AI”, railed: “There is just no way can you build reliable agents on this f... Read more...

Redaction without recompression

As I was compiling bug reports for a Vision Language Model vendor, I found the need to redact images without JPEG recompression: simply re-saving a particular sample image that had originally triggered a repitition loop with the MLLM changed the image in such a way that I could not reproduce the problem. Solution: asenior/Jpeg-Redaction-Library.... Read more...

Entropy-based "Shrek Sampling"

The community is porting the “Shrek Sampler” to different hardware (MLX) and Transformer architectures, just days after Entropix was first released. Nice visualization from the MLX port: 9.9 vs. 9.11. Pierre-Carl Langlais, Co-founder of Pleias.fr, posted his Colab notebook that runs entropix with Smollm-360M (the original release uses Llama 3.2 ... Read more...

State of AI report

The State of AI report 2024 is available. Some notes: their definition of “Agent” seems reasonable: “AI Agent: an AI-powered system that can take actions in an environment. For example, an LLM that has access to a suite of tools and has to decide which one to use in order to accomplish a task that it has been prompted to do.”. Jaana Dogan, Pr... Read more...