8 ms·
Why did you have access to a preview?
by kurtis_reed 1y ago
Why did you have access to a preview?
- simonw 1y agoI get access to previews from OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini pretty often. They're usually accompanied by an NDA and an embargo date - in this case the embargo was 10am Pacific this morning. I won't accept preview access if it comes with any conditions at all about what I can say about the model once the embargo has lifted.
- poopiokaka 1y ago[flagged]
- 0x696C6961 1y agoWhy do you even care?
- dboreham 1y agoNDAs often prohibit publishing...the NDA.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago[flagged]
- dzhiurgis 1y agoSoooo that leaves xAI that had conditions
- minimaxir 1y agoSimon tends to write up reports of new LLM releases (with great community respect) and it's much easier with lead time if the provider is able to set up a preview endpoint.
- criddell 1y agoI believe the criticism is that he's reporting on a pre-release LLM which isn't the same as the one you and I are going to be using a few weeks from now after they've downgraded it enough to work at scale.
- Redster 1y agoSimonw is a cheerful and straightforward AI journalist who likes to show and not just tell. He has done a good job aggregating and documenting the progress of LLM tools and models. As I understand it, OpenAI and Anthropic have both wisely decided to make sure he has up to date info because they know he'll write about it. Thanks for all your work, Simon! You're my favorite journalist in this space and I really appreciate your tone.
- knowsuchagency 1y agoI like Simon, but he's not a journalist. A journalist would not have gone to OpenAI to glaze the GPT-5 release with Theo. I don't say this to discount Simon -- I appreciate his writing and analysis but a journalist, he isn't.
- Redster 1y agoThat's a fair point. I feel like he's more than a blogger and am not sure the best term!
- LudwigNagasena 1y agoAn influencer.
- simonw 1y agoI don't call myself a journalist, partly because no publication is paying me to do any of this! If I had an editor I imagine they would have talked me out of going to the OpenAI office for a mysterious product preview session with a film crew.
- lossolo 1y agoThe same reason YouTube reviewers and influencers get access to hardware or games before release. In this case, the person is a passionate blogger.
- rapfaria 1y agoHis "pelican riding a bicycle" tests are now a classic and AI shops are benchmaxxing for it
- simonw 1y agoThey need to benchmaxxx a whole lot harder, the illustrations still all universally suck!
- lxgr 1y agoI fully expect a model to output a SVG made up of 1000x1000 rectangles (i.e. pixels) representing a raster image of a beautifully hand-drawn pelican riding a bicycle any day now :)
- simonw 1y agoI got an amazing result from ChatGPT a while back - an SVG with a perfect illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle. It was suspiciously good in fact... so I downloaded the SVG file and found out it had generated a raster image with its image tool and then embedded it as base64 binary image data inside an SVG wrapper!
- dhhugley 1y agoYou’ll just have to move the goalpost then; perhaps it can be a multidimensional pelican saving the multiverse, or an invisible pelican that only you can see and critique.
- lxgr 1y agoHow would that help, given that ChatGPT has apparently already figured out how to consistently and systematically game the benchmark by working in pixel space and only using SVG as a wrapper for a raster image? FWIW, I could totally see a not hugely more advanced model using its native image generation capabilities and then running a vector extraction tool on it, maybe iteratively. (And maybe I would not consider that cheating, anymore, since at some point that probably resembles what humans do?)
- lomase 1y agoThey are an AI evangelist that told me I can replace any technical book created with an LLM. They are a nice person.
- rhizome 1y agoYou are correct, sir!
- mvdtnz 1y ago[flagged]
- lomase 1y agoHe is very interested in the topic and sometimes too enthusiastic, but I saying he shills is not productive and a lie.
- dang 1y agoCould you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been doing it repeatedly, we've asked you to stop several times, and you haven't stopped yet. We end up banning that sort of account, so if you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, that'd be good.
- kissgyorgy 1y agoIf you want to keep up with AI progress and model updates, simonw is the man to follow!
- runjake 1y agosimonw is Simon Willison, who’s well known for a number of things. But these days, he’s well known for his AI centric blog and his tools. The AI companies give him early access to stuff. https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/