davemounthill/ai-notes

notes for software engineers getting up to speed on new AI developments. Serves as datastore for lspace.swyx.io writing, and product brainstorming, but has cleaned up canonical references under the /Resources folder.

AI Notes

notes on AI state of the art, with a focus on generative and large language models. These are the "raw materials" for the https://lspace.swyx.io/ newsletter.

This repo used to be called https://github.com/sw-yx/prompt-eng, but was renamed because Prompt Engineering is Overhyped.

This Readme is just the high level overview of the space; you should see the most updates in the OTHER markdown files in this repo:

• IMAGE_GEN.md - the most developed file, with the heaviest emphasis notes on Stable Diffusion, and some on midjourney and dalle.
  • IMAGE_PROMPTS.md - a small swipe file of good image prompts
• TEXT.md - text generation, mostly with GPT3
  • TEXT_CHAT.md - information on ChatGPT and competitors, as well as derivative products
  • TEXT_SEARCH.md - information on GPT3 enabled semantic search and other info
  • TEXT_PROMPTS.md - a small swipe file of good GPT3 prompts
• INFRA.md - raw notes on AI Infrastructure, Hardware and Scaling
• AUDIO.md - tracking audio/music/voice transcription + generation
• stub notes - very small/lightweight proto pages
  • AGENTS.md - tracking "agentic AI"
  • CODE.md - codegen models, like Copilot
  • etc...

Table of Contents

• Motivational Use Cases
• Top AI Reads
• Communities
• People
• Misc
• Quotes, Reality & Demotivation
• Legal, Ethics, and Privacy

Motivational Use Cases

• images
  • https://mpost.io/best-100-stable-diffusion-prompts-the-most-beautiful-ai-text-to-image-prompts/
  • 3D MRI synthetic brain images - positive reception from neuroimaging statistician
  • multiplayer stable diffusion
• video
  • img2img of famous movie scenes (lalaland)
    • img2img transforming actor with ebsynth + koe_recast
    • how ebsynth works https://twitter.com/TomLikesRobots/status/1612047103806545923?s=20
  • virtual fashion (karenxcheng)
  • seamless tiling images
  • evolution of scenes (xander)
  • outpainting https://twitter.com/orbamsterdam/status/1568200010747068417?s=21&t=rliacnWOIjJMiS37s8qCCw
  • webUI img2img collaboration https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1563582621757898752
  • image to video with rotation https://twitter.com/TomLikesRobots/status/1571096804539912192
  • "prompt paint" https://twitter.com/1littlecoder/status/1572573152974372864
  • audio2video animation of your face https://twitter.com/siavashg/status/1597588865665363969
  • physical toys to 3d model + animation https://twitter.com/sergeyglkn/status/1587430510988611584
  • music videos
    • video killed the radio star, colab This uses OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text, allowing you to take a YouTube video & create a Stable Diffusion animation prompted by the lyrics in the YouTube video
    • Stable Diffusion Videos generates videos by interpolating between prompts and audio
  • direct text2video project
    • https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1575546841533497344
    • https://makeavideo.studio/ - explorer https://webvid.datasette.io/webvid/videos
    • https://phenaki.video/
    • https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo
    • https://imagen.research.google/video/
• text-to-3d https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1575541930905243652
  • https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/
  • open source impl: https://github.com/ashawkey/stable-dreamfusion
  • demo https://twitter.com/_akhaliq/status/1578035919403503616
• text products
• Jasper
• GPT for Obsidian https://reasonabledeviations.com/2023/02/05/gpt-for-second-brain/
• gpt3 email https://github.com/sw-yx/gpt3-email
• gpt3() in google sheet 2020, 2022 - sheet google sheets https://twitter.com/mehran__jalali/status/1608159307513618433
  • https://gpt3demo.com/apps/google-sheets
  • Charm https://twitter.com/shubroski/status/1620139262925754368?s=20
• https://www.summari.com/ Summari helps busy people read more
• sequoia market map https://twitter.com/sonyatweetybird/status/1584580362339962880
• base10 market map https://twitter.com/letsenhance_io/status/1594826383305449491
• matt shumer market map https://twitter.com/mattshumer_/status/1620465468229451776 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sewTBzRF087F6hFXiyeOIsGC1N4N3O7rYzijVexCgoQ/edit
• game assets -
  • emad thread https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1591436813750906882
  • scenario.gg https://twitter.com/emmanuel_2m/status/1593356241283125251
  • 3d game character modeling example
  • MarioGPT https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05981.pdf https://www.slashgear.com/1199870/mariogpt-uses-ai-to-generate-endless-super-mario-levels-for-free/ https://github.com/shyamsn97/mario-gpt/blob/main/mario_gpt/level.py

Top AI Reads

The more advanced GPT3 reads have been split out to https://github.com/sw-yx/prompt-eng/blob/main/GPT.md

• https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#prompts-as-programming
• https://learnprompting.org/

Beginner Reads

• openAI prompt tutorial https://beta.openai.com/docs/quickstart/add-some-examples
• google LAMDA intro https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/how-lamda-works
• humanloop prolpt engineering 101 https://website-olo3k29b2-humanloopml.vercel.app/blog/prompt-engineering-101
• DALLE2 prompt writing book http://dallery.gallery/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/The-DALL%C2%B7E-2-prompt-book-v1.02.pdf
• https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/prompt-engineering-the-career-of-future-2fb93f90f117
• https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Stable_Diffusion overview
• https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x41n87/how_to_get_images_that_dont_suck_a/
• https://mpost.io/best-100-stable-diffusion-prompts-the-most-beautiful-ai-text-to-image-prompts/
• https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
• https://ourworldindata.org/brief-history-of-ai ai progress overview with nice charts
• for nontechnical
  • https://www.jonstokes.com/p/ai-content-generation-part-1-machine
  • https://www.protocol.com/generative-ai-startup-landscape-map
  • https://twitter.com/saranormous/status/1572791179636518913

Intermediate Reads

• openai prompt eng cookbook https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/blob/main/techniques_to_improve_reliability.md
• Recap of 2022's major AI developments https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/issue-176/
• DALLE2 asset generation + inpainting https://twitter.com/aifunhouse/status/1576202480936886273?s=20&t=5EXa1uYDPVa2SjZM-SxhCQ
• suhail journey https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1541276314485018625?s=20&t=X2MVKQKhDR28iz3VZEEO8w
• composable diffusion - "AND" instead of "and" https://twitter.com/TomLikesRobots/status/1580293860902985728
• on BPE tokenization https://towardsdatascience.com/byte-pair-encoding-subword-based-tokenization-algorithm-77828a70bee0 see also google sentencepiece and openai tiktoken
• creates its own language https://twitter.com/giannis_daras/status/1531693104821985280
• img2img https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw/
• quest for photorealism https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x9zmjd/quest_for_ultimate_photorealism_part_2_colors/
  • https://medium.com/merzazine/prompt-design-for-dall-e-photorealism-emulating-reality-6f478df6f186
• settings tweaking https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x3k79h/the_feeling_of_discovery_sd_is_like_a_great_proc/
  • seed selection https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x8szj9/tutorial_seed_selection_and_the_impact_on_your/
  • minor parameter parameter difference study (steps, clamp_max, ETA, cutn_batches, etc) https://twitter.com/KyrickYoung/status/1500196286930292742
  • Generative AI: Autocomplete for everything https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/generative-ai-autocomplete-for-everything?sd=pf
  • How does GPT Obtain its Ability? Tracing Emergent Abilities of Language Models to their Sources good paper with the development history of the GPT family of models and how the capabilities developed

Advanced Reads

• Transformers from scratch https://e2eml.school/transformers.html
  • transformers vs LSTM https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/why-are-lstms-struggling-to-matchup-with-transformers-a1cc5b2557e3
  • transformer code walkthru https://twitter.com/mark_riedl/status/1555188022534176768
  • transformer familyi https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-01-27-the-transformer-family-v2/
    • carmack paper list https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639634
    • Transformer models: an introduction and catalog https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07730
• karpathy on transformers
  • https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1582807367988654081
  • Build GPT from scratch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY
• 137 emergent abilities of large language models
  • Emergent few-shot prompted tasks: BIG-Bench and MMLU benchmarks
  • Emergent prompting strategies
    • Instruction-following
    • Scratchpad
    • Using open-book knowledge for fact checking
    • Chain-of-thought prompting
    • Differentiable search index
    • Self-consistency
    • Leveraging explanations in prompting
    • Least-to-most prompting
    • Zero-shot chain-of-thought
    • Calibration via P(True)
    • Multilingual chain-of-thought
    • Ask-me-anything prompting
  • Eugene Yan explanation of the Text to Image stack https://eugeneyan.com/writing/text-to-image/
  • VQGAN/CLIP https://minimaxir.com/2021/08/vqgan-clip/
  • 10 years of Image generation history https://zentralwerkstatt.org/blog/ten-years-of-image-synthesis
  • Vision Transformers (ViT) Explained https://www.pinecone.io/learn/vision-transformers/
  • negative prompting https://minimaxir.com/2022/11/stable-diffusion-negative-prompt/
  • best papers of 2022 https://www.yitay.net/blog/2022-best-nlp-papers
• more prompt eng papers https://github.com/dair-ai/Prompt-Engineering-Guide
• https://creator.nightcafe.studio/vqgan-clip-keyword-modifier-comparison VQGAN+CLIP Keyword Modifier Comparison We compared 126 keyword modifiers with the same prompt and initial image. These are the results.
  • https://creator.nightcafe.studio/collection/8dMYgKm1eVXG7z9pV23W
• Google released PartiPrompts as a benchmark: https://parti.research.google/ "PartiPrompts (P2) is a rich set of over 1600 prompts in English that we release as part of this work. P2 can be used to measure model capabilities across various categories and challenge aspects."
• Video tutorials
  • Pixel art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvJkQPtr-8s&feature=youtu.be
• History of papers
  • 2008: Unified Architecture for NLP (Collobert-Weston) https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1611921657802768384
  • 2015: Semi-supervised sequence learning https://twitter.com/deliprao/status/1611896130589057025?s=20
  • 2017: Transformers (Vaswani et al)
  • 2018: GPT (Radford et al)
• Misc
  • StabilityAI CIO perspective https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/the-turning-point-for-truly-open?sd=pf
  • https://github.com/awesome-stable-diffusion/awesome-stable-diffusion
  • https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps guide to msft prompt research

Communities

• StableDiffusion Discord https://discord.com/invite/stablediffusion
• LAION discord https://discord.gg/xBPBXfcFHd
• Eleuther discord: https://www.eleuther.ai/get-involved/ (primer)
• https://reddit.com/r/stableDiffusion
• Akhaliq Discord: https://discord.gg/nYqfg4gnBt
• Karpathy Discord: https://discord.gg/3zy8kqD9Cp
• HuggingFace Discord: https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/join-the-hugging-face-discord/11263
• Deforum Discord https://discord.gg/upmXXsrwZc
• Lexica Discord https://discord.com/invite/bMHBjJ9wRh
• Perplexity Discord https://discord.com/invite/kWJZsxPDuX
• Midjourney's discord
  • how to use midjourney v4 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1588856386540417024?s=20&t=PlgLuGAEEds9HwfegVRrpg
• https://stablehorde.net/

People

This list will be out of date but will get you started. My live list of people to follow is at: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1585430245762441216

• Researchers/Developers
  • https://twitter.com/_jasonwei
  • https://twitter.com/johnowhitaker/status/1565710033463156739
  • https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1564671546341425157
  • https://twitter.com/SchmidhuberAI
  • https://twitter.com/nearcyan
  • https://twitter.com/karinanguyen_
  • https://twitter.com/abhi_venigalla
  • https://twitter.com/advadnoun
  • https://twitter.com/polynoamial
  • https://twitter.com/vovahimself
  • https://twitter.com/sarahookr
  • https://twitter.com/shaneguML
  • https://twitter.com/MaartenSap
  • https://twitter.com/ethanCaballero
  • https://twitter.com/ShayneRedford
  • https://twitter.com/seb_ruder
  • https://twitter.com/rasbt
  • https://twitter.com/wightmanr
  • https://twitter.com/GaryMarcus
  • https://twitter.com/ylecun
  • https://twitter.com/karpathy
  • https://twitter.com/pirroh
  • https://twitter.com/eerac
• News/Aggregators
  • https://twitter.com/ai__pub
  • https://twitter.com/WeirdStableAI
  • https://twitter.com/multimodalart
  • https://twitter.com/LastWeekinAI
  • https://twitter.com/paperswithcode
  • https://twitter.com/DeepLearningAI_
  • https://twitter.com/dl_weekly
  • https://twitter.com/slashML
  • https://twitter.com/_akhaliq
  • https://twitter.com/aaditya_ai
  • https://twitter.com/bentossell
  • https://twitter.com/johnvmcdonnell
• Founders/Builders/VCs
  • https://twitter.com/levelsio
  • https://twitter.com/goodside
  • https://twitter.com/c_valenzuelab
  • https://twitter.com/Raza_Habib496
  • https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1562455690714775552
  • https://twitter.com/genekogan/status/1555184488606564353
  • https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1566069427501764613?s=20&t=camPsWtMHdSSEHqWd0K7Ig
  • https://twitter.com/amanrsanger
  • https://twitter.com/ctjlewis
  • https://twitter.com/sarahcat21
  • https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF
  • https://twitter.com/alexandr_wang
  • https://twitter.com/rameerez
  • https://twitter.com/scottastevenson
  • https://twitter.com/denisyarats
• Stability
  • https://twitter.com/StabilityAI
  • https://twitter.com/StableDiffusion
  • https://twitter.com/hardmaru
  • https://twitter.com/JJitsev
• OpenAI
  • https://twitter.com/sama
  • https://twitter.com/ilyasut
  • https://twitter.com/miramurati
• HuggingFace
  • https://twitter.com/younesbelkada
• Artists
  • https://twitter.com/karenxcheng/status/1564626773001719813
  • https://twitter.com/TomLikesRobots
• Other
  • Companies
    • https://twitter.com/AnthropicAI
    • https://twitter.com/AssemblyAI
    • https://twitter.com/CohereAI
    • https://twitter.com/MosaicML
    • https://twitter.com/MetaAI
    • https://twitter.com/DeepMind
    • https://twitter.com/HelloPaperspace
• Bots and Apps
  • https://twitter.com/dreamtweetapp
  • https://twitter.com/aiarteveryhour

Quotes, Reality & Demotivation

• Narrow, tedium domain usecases https://twitter.com/WillManidis/status/1584900092615528448 and https://twitter.com/WillManidis/status/1584900100480192516
• antihype https://twitter.com/alexandr_wang/status/1573302977418387457
• antihype https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1612142423425138688?s=46&t=pLCNW9pF-co4bn08QQVaUg
• prompt eng memes
  • https://twitter.com/_jasonwei/status/1516844920367054848
• things stablediffusion struggles with https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/
• New Google
  • https://twitter.com/alexandr_wang/status/1585022891594510336
• New Powerpoint
• via emad
• Appending prompts by default in UI
• DALLE: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1588588688115912705?s=20&t=0ojpGmH9k6MiEDyVG2I6gg

Legal, Ethics, and Privacy

• NSFW filter https://vickiboykis.com/2022/11/18/some-notes-on-the-stable-diffusion-safety-filter/
• On "AI Art Panic" https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/
• Yannick influencing OPENRAIL-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5M-dvzpzSQ
• art schools accepting AI art https://twitter.com/DaveRogenmoser/status/1597746558145265664
• DRM issues https://undeleted.ronsor.com/voice.ai-gpl-violations-with-a-side-of-drm/
• stealing art https://stablediffusionlitigation.com
  • http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/
  • stable attribution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670136
  • coutner argument for disney https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1616219435492163584?s=46&t=HqQqDH1yEwhWUSQxYTmF8w
  • research on stable diffusion copying https://twitter.com/officialzhvng/status/1620535905298817024?s=20&t=NC-nW7pfDa8nyRD08Lx1Nw This paper used Stable Diffusion to generate 175 million images over 350,000 prompts and only found 109 near copies of training data. Am I right that my main takeaway from this is how good Stable Diffusion is at not memorizing training examples?

Alignment, Safety

• Anthropic - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.00861.pdf
  • Helpful: attempt to do what is ask. concise, efficient. ask followups. redirect bad questions.
  • Honest: give accurate information, express uncertainty. don't imitate responses expected from an expert if it doesn't have the capabilities/knowledge
  • Harmless: not offensive/discriminatory. refuse to assist dangerous acts. recognize when providing sensitive/consequential advice
  • criticism and boundaries as future direction https://twitter.com/davidad/status/1628489924235206657?s=46&t=TPVwcoqO8qkc7MuaWiNcnw
• Just Eliezer entire body of work
  • https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1625922986590212096

Misc

• Whisper
  • https://huggingface.co/spaces/sensahin/YouWhisper YouWhisper converts Youtube videos to text using openai/whisper.
  • https://twitter.com/jeffistyping/status/1573145140205846528 youtube whipserer
  • multilingual subtitles https://twitter.com/1littlecoder/status/1573030143848722433
  • video subtitles https://twitter.com/m1guelpf/status/1574929980207034375
  • you can join whisper to stable diffusion for reasons https://twitter.com/fffiloni/status/1573733520765247488/photo/1
  • known problems https://twitter.com/lunixbochs/status/1574848899897884672 (edge case with catastrophic failures)
• textually guided audio https://twitter.com/FelixKreuk/status/1575846953333579776
• Codegen
  • CodegeeX https://twitter.com/thukeg/status/1572218413694726144
  • https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen https://joel.tools/codegen/
• pdf to structured data - Impira used t to do it (dead link: https://www.impira.com/blog/hey-machine-whats-my-invoice-total) but if you look hard enough on twitter there are some alternatives
• text to Human Motion diffusion https://twitter.com/GuyTvt/status/1577947409551851520
  • abs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.14916
  • project page: https://guytevet.github.io/mdm-page/