Simon Willison has surfaced renewed cases where Google Search shows so-called “featured snippets” (🇩🇪 “hervorgehobene Snippets”) that answer the user search flat-out wrong. Simon writes on Bluesky: This is a particularly bad case-study in how badly AI summarization can go when its exposed to the wilds of the internet It’s not “AI Summarizat... Read more 29 Dec 2024 - 1 minute read
With end-of-year roundups and predictions being in season, it’s also worthwhile to consider what hasn’t, despite ceaseless cheerling, been achieved or announced: Quantum advantage in breaking real-world encryption. While classical computing has cracked very weak RSA (trivially small key size of perhaps 1/10^535 the strength of today’s d... Read more 26 Dec 2024 - less than 1 minute read
Recently, a few open-source tools for converting PDFs, Office documents, and other formats into Markdown have drawn attention. Among these are MarkItDown from Microsoft, Docling from IBM Research, PyMuPDF4LLM, and the Jina AI Reader API. They aim to provide text suitable for downstream tasks, including LLM-driven analysis, without requiring manu... Read more 14 Dec 2024 - 3 minute read
Quick notes on last week’s foundation model releases: OpenAI o1 o1 was released through ChatGPT: it’s a stark improvement over the o1-preview available through API; o1-preview basically not representative. The new “o1 Pro Mode” is a class of its own: it aces through almost all of the subject tasks in a survey paper I have under submission, and ... Read more 12 Dec 2024 - 1 minute read
Since there’s community interest in how to set up AWS to use the new Amazon Nova models, here’s a step-by-step guide to get everyone started: Ensure you have model access: open Bedrock in us-west-2 region, scroll down in the menu on the left, and hit Model Access: Check model selection (green arrow), request models if acces... Read more 03 Dec 2024 - 1 minute read