Simon Willison: belief

Transcript context

…I think functions are just the complete utter game changer to everything. And if you're gonna run any kind of sensitive data through this, I don't think any large company or medical field should let you run it without a function to clean up what you're sending through. So this goes both ways. Yes, it opens up major security holes, but at the same time, it completely changes everything. And I mean it because up until now, Yeah, you could do a, a lot of things, but operations were really hard. Scaling was really hard. The thing has a mind of its own. Sometimes it, it, it returns stuff in the right structure. Sometimes it don't. And like, how do you build products around those? Because in computer science and Devrel and stuff, like you expect a response either in error or in a certain format, and it didn't have that. Well, now you do, so now you have an interface to the whole world. Now you can do stuff with it. Like this completely changes everything because, so you clear it off, you can clean up your data. You are finally free. I agree with everything you just said. Go ahead. I completely agree, and yet the security implications are still terrifying to me. But yeah, no, I'm, I'm super excited. I'm going to, I have things I'm going to build on top of this, but I'm gonna be very careful about the, I think the reversibility. Especially like I want to build things that let people clean up data. Like have a conversation with your data to clean it. Because everyone who works with data says this spend 90% of the time on cleaning. They hate it. It's great. I want to solve that problem, but I want there to be an undue function precisely to, to protect against some of the things that could go wrong. There's a couple of things I wanted to say. Like, one is while I shared like the excitement, I think that we still have to be careful because, you know, these things are still going to hallucinate and there's not going to, there's, there's still not a. A clear way to overcome that, even using functions. That's number one. And number two is that I kind of want to echo what may have said before. And while I, I do appreciate that again, this is like a great advancement. It's super cool. I don't know if I would call it a game changer because this has existed, right? Like this, this has happened in various, various frameworks, you know, blank chain guidance you know, other, other frameworks have guardrails in place. Yes, this, this looks like a very good implementation of this concept of having guardrails and being able to basically force the LLM to do what you want. And yes, it's very you know, It's, it's, it's beneficial to all of us that open AI that owns these models, actually put, put like some effort into fine tuning their own model so that this works really well. But I, I just, I just wanna curb the enthusiasm a little bit, right? To just say like, this isn't like, you know, earth shattering and like, hasn't, we haven't seen anything…

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