There’s a new breed of GenAI Application Engineers who can build more-powerful applications faster than was possible before, thanks to generative AI. Individuals who can play this role are highly sought-after by businesses, but the job description is still coming into focus. [...]

Skilled GenAI Application Engineers meet two primary criteria: (i) They are able to use the new AI building blocks to quickly build powerful applications. (ii) They are able to use AI assistance to carry out rapid engineering, building software systems in dramatically less time than was possible before. In addition, good product/design instincts are a significant bonus.

— Andrew Ng

Tags: careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, andrew-ng

My post this morning about Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections is an example of a blogging format I'd love to see more of: informal but informed commentary on academic papers. Academic papers are generally hard to read. Sadly that's almost a req...

This new paper by 11 authors from organizations including IBM, Invariant Labs, ETH Zurich, Google and Microsoft is an excellent addition to the literature on prompt injection and LLM security. In this work, we describe a number of design patterns for LLM agents that signifi...

It's this blog's 23rd birthday today!

On June 12th 2022 I celebrated Twenty years of my blog with a big post full of highlights. Looking back now I'm amused to notice that my 20th birthday post came within two weeks of my earliest writing about LLMs: A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3 and How to use the GPT-3 language model.

My generative-ai tag has reached 1,184 posts now.

I really do feel like blogging is onto its second wind. The amount of influence you can have on the world by consistently blogging about a subject is just as high today as it was back in the 2000s when blogging first started.

The best time to start a blog may have been twenty years ago, but the second best time to start a blog is today.

Tags: generative-ai, blogging

‘How come I can’t breathe?': Musk’s data company draws a backlash in Memphis The biggest environmental scandal in AI right now should be the xAI data center in Memphis, which has been running for nearly a year on 35 methane gas turbines under a "temporary" basis: The turbin...

Agentic Coding Recommendations

There's a ton of actionable advice on using Claude Code in this new piece from Armin Ronacher. He's getting excellent results from Go, especially having invested a bunch of work in making the various tools (linters, tests, development servers etc) as accessible as possible through documenting them in a Makefile.

Armin also recently shared a half hour YouTube video in which he worked with Claude Code to resolve two medium complexity issues in his minijinja Rust templating library, resulting in PR #805 and PR #804.

Via @mitsuhiko.at

Tags: go, ai, llms, rust, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, anthropic, claude, claude-code

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Here's the lawsuit on Document Cloud - 110 pages, most of which are examples of supposedly infringing images.

Tags: ai-ethics, midjourney, generative-ai, training-data, ai, law

Breaking down ‘EchoLeak’, the First Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Enabling Data Exfiltration from Microsoft 365 Copilot Aim Labs reported CVE-2025-32711 against Microsoft 365 Copilot back in January, and the fix is now rolled out. This is an extended variant of the prompt inje...

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Tags: ai-ethics, midjourney, generative-ai, training-data, ai, law

Malleable software New, delightful manifesto from Ink & Switch. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs. Modification becomes routine, not exceptional. Adaptation happens at the point o...

Since Jevons' original observation about coal-fired steam engines is a bit hard to relate to, my favourite modernized example for people who aren't software nerds is display technology. Old CRT screens were horribly inefficient - they were large, clunky and absolutely guzzl...

[on the cheaper o3] Not quantized. Weights are the same.

If we did change the model, we'd release it as a new model with a new name in the API (e.g., o3-turbo-2025-06-10). It would be very annoying to API customers if we ever silently changed models, so we never do this [1].

[1] chatgpt-4o-latest being an explicit exception

— Ted Sanders, Research Manager, OpenAI

Tags: generative-ai, openai, o3, ai, llms

(People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)

— Sam Altman, The Gentle Singularity

Tags: sam-altman, generative-ai, ai-energy-usage, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms

AI-assisted coding for teams that can't get away with vibes This excellent piece by Atharva Raykar offers a bunch of astute observations on AI-assisted development that I haven't seen written down elsewhere. Building with AI is fast. The gains in velocity are important, bec...

o3-pro OpenAI released o3-pro today, which they describe as a "version of o3 with more compute for better responses". It's only available via the newer Responses API. I've added it to my llm-openai-plugin plugin which uses that new API, so you can try it out like this: llm i...

OpenAI just dropped the price of their o3 model by 80% - from $10/million input tokens and $40/million output tokens to just $2/million and $8/million for the very same model. This is in advance of the release of o3-pro which apparently is coming later today.

This is a pretty huge shake-up in LLM pricing. o3 is now priced the same as GPT 4.1, and slightly less than GPT-4o ($2.50/$10). It’s also less than Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 ($3/$15) and Opus 4 ($15/$75) and sits in between Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro for >200,00 tokens ($2.50/$15) and 2.5 Pro for <200,000 ($1.25/$10).

I’ve updated my llm-prices.com pricing calculator with the new rate.

How have they dropped the price so much? OpenAI's Adam Groth credits ongoing optimization work:

thanks to the engineers optimizing inferencing.

Tags: generative-ai, openai, o3, llm-pricing, ai, llms

Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI Mistral's first reasoning model is out today, in two sizes. There's a 24B Apache 2 licensed open-weights model called Magistral Small (actually Magistral-Small-2506), and a larger API-only model called Magistral Medium. Mag...

The process of learning and experimenting with LLM-derived technology has been an exercise in humility. In general I love learning new things when the art of programming changes […] But LLMs, and more specifically Agents, affect the process of writing programs in a new and confusing way. Absolutely every fundamental assumption about how I work has to be questioned, and it ripples through all the experience I have accumulated. There are days when it feels like I would be better off if I did not know anything about programming and started from scratch. And it is still changing.

— David Crawshaw, How I program with Agents

Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai-agents, ai, llms

OpenAI hits $10 billion in annual recurring revenue fueled by ChatGPT growth

Noteworthy because OpenAI revenue is a useful indicator of the direction of the generative AI industry in general, and frequently comes up in conversations about the sustainability of the current bubble.

OpenAI has hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue less than three years after launching its popular ChatGPT chatbot.

The figure includes sales from the company’s consumer products, ChatGPT business products and its application programming interface, or API. It excludes licensing revenue from Microsoft and large one-time deals, according to an OpenAI spokesperson.

For all of last year, OpenAI was around $5.5 billion in ARR. [...]

So these new numbers represent nearly double the ARR figures for last year.

Tags: openai, llms, ai, generative-ai

WWDC: Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers Here's the Apple press release for today's WWDC announcements. Two things that stood out to me: Foundation Models Framework With the Foundation Models framework, developers will be able to build on Apple Int...

Qwen3 Embedding New family of embedding models from Qwen, in three sizes: 0.6B, 4B, 8B - and two categories: Text Embedding and Text Reranking. The full collection can be browsed on Hugging Face. The smallest available model is the 0.6B Q8 one, which is available as a 639MB ...

It's been a long time coming, but we finally have some promising LLMs to try out which are trained entirely on openly licensed text! EleutherAI released the Pile four and a half years ago: "an 800GB dataset of diverse text for language modeling". It's been used as the basis ...

For [Natasha] Lyonne, the draw of AI isn’t speed or scale — it’s independence. “I’m not trying to run a tech company,” she told me. “It’s more that I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t want the tech people deciding the future of the medium.” She imagines a future in which indie film...

I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event - here's my talks from October 2023 and June 2024. My topic this time was "The last six months in LLMs" - originally planned as the last yea...

gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05: Try the latest Gemini 2.5 Pro before general availability Announced on stage today by Logan Kilpatrick at the AI Engineer World’s Fair, who indicated that this will likely be the last in the Gemini 2.5 Pro series. The previous model ID was gemin...

Solomon Hykes just presented the best definition of an AI agent I've seen yet, on stage at the AI Engineer World's Fair:

An AI agent is an LLM wrecking its environment in a loop.

I collect AI agent definitions and I really like this how this one combines the currently popular "tools in a loop" one (see Anthropic) with the classic academic definition that I think dates back to at least the 90s:

An agent is something that acts in an environment; it does something. Agents include worms, dogs, thermostats, airplanes, robots, humans, companies, and countries.

Tags: ai-agents, llms, ai, generative-ai

OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats This is very worrying. The New York Times v OpenAI lawsuit, now in its 17th month, includes accusations that OpenAI's models can output verbatim copies of New York Times content - both from training d...

Cracking The Dave & Buster’s Anomaly

Guilherme Rambo reports on a weird iOS messages bug:

The bug is that, if you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who’s also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name “Dave and Buster’s”, the message will never be received.

Guilherme captured the logs from an affected device and spotted an XHTMLParseFailure error.

It turned out the iOS automatic transcription mechanism was recognizing the brand name and converting it to the official restaurant chain's preferred spelling "Dave & Buster’s"... which was then incorrectly escaped and triggered a parse error!

Tags: xml, ios, xhtml

PR #537: Fix Markdown in og descriptions Since OpenAI Codex is now available to us ChatGPT Plus subscribers I decided to try it out against my blog. It's a very nice implementation of the GitHub-connected coding "agent" pattern, as also seen in Google's Jules and Microsoft's...

Codex agent internet access Sam Altman, just now: codex gets access to the internet today! it is off by default and there are complex tradeoffs; people should read about the risks carefully and use when it makes sense. This is the Codex "cloud-based software engineering ag...