- This repository contains the code and notebooks for the O'Reilly book "Hands-On Large Language Models" by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst, offering practical guidance and visually rich explanations of LLMs.

- The repository provides chapter-wise notebooks designed for Google Colab, covering topics from basic concepts to advanced techniques like fine-tuning and multimodal LLMs.

- The book and accompanying resources aim to provide a practical and visually intuitive understanding of LLMs, with code examples and additional guides available in the repository.

- OpenAI's new "reasoning" AI models, o3 and o4-mini, surprisingly exhibit higher hallucination rates compared to older OpenAI models, despite performing better in coding and math.

- OpenAI admits they don't fully understand why these new models hallucinate more, stating that "more research is needed" to address the issue.

- Third-party testing confirms the increased hallucination tendency, potentially impacting the models' usefulness in accuracy-critical business applications.

- The author expresses strong disdain for hype, particularly in the tech industry, highlighting its negative consequences for investors, businesses, and individuals.

- The article argues that the current AI hype is largely exaggerated and misleading, driven by profit motives and resulting in poor decision-making, such as premature layoffs and vendor lock-in.

- The author advocates for independent thinking and critical evaluation of AI's actual capabilities, warning against blindly following trends and emphasizing the importance of considering resource consumption and potential privacy implications.

- StarterPilot is an AI-powered toolkit designed to help entrepreneurs quickly validate, name, brand, and launch their startup ideas.

- The platform automates key early-stage processes like market validation, logo generation, and landing page creation.

- It aims to reduce the time and cost associated with launching a new business, enabling faster iteration and market entry.

- Proposes a novel variational method for computing neural Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) from unoriented point clouds.

- Replaces the eikonal equation with the heat method, adapting a standard technique for discrete surfaces to the neural network domain.

- Achieves state-of-the-art surface reconstruction and consistent SDF gradients, demonstrating accuracy for solving PDEs on the zero-level set.

- OpenAI's new models (o3, o4-mini) can "reason" through images, enabling users to perform reverse location searches from photos with surprising accuracy.

- This capability raises privacy concerns, as it could be used to doxx individuals from publicly available images.

- While effective, the article notes that older models can achieve similar results, and the new models are not always accurate.

- Kagi Assistant, previously exclusive to Ultimate plan subscribers, is now available to all Kagi users across all plans at no additional cost, rolling out in phases by region.

- Kagi Assistant integrates AI grounded in Kagi Search results, respecting user privacy and offering features like custom assistants, prompt editing, and a choice of LLMs (limited on non-Ultimate plans).

- Kagi is enforcing a fair-use policy based on plan value to ensure sustainability, with usage limits tied to the monetary value of the plan and token costs of the AI models used.

- A new ChatGPT version (likely GPT-4o or a similar model) can accurately geolocate outdoor photos, potentially solving GeoGuesser-like challenges.

- This capability significantly lowers the barrier for location identification, shifting the threat model for posting outdoor photos from skilled analysis to readily accessible AI.

- Users are advised to update their threat models and be aware of the increased risk of location exposure when sharing images online, even without EXIF data.

- UniK3D is a novel method for monocular 3D estimation that works with arbitrary camera models, addressing limitations of existing methods that assume pinhole cameras or rectified images.

- It uses a spherical 3D representation and a learned superposition of spherical harmonics for a model-independent representation of the pencil of rays, enabling accurate metric 3D reconstruction.

- The method achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across diverse datasets, especially in challenging wide-field-of-view and panoramic settings.

- Gemini 2.5 Flash, a new model in preview via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, offers improved reasoning capabilities with a focus on speed and cost-efficiency.

- It introduces a "thinking budget" feature, allowing developers to control the amount of reasoning the model performs, balancing quality, cost, and latency.

- Developers can set the thinking budget to 0 to maintain the speed of 2.0 Flash while still improving performance, or adjust the budget to improve reasoning quality for more complex tasks.

- AgentAPI provides an HTTP API to control coding agents like Claude Code, Goose, Aider, and Codex, enabling programmatic interaction.

- It works by emulating a terminal, translating API calls into keystrokes, and parsing the agent's terminal output into structured messages, removing TUI elements.

- The project aims to become a universal adapter for coding agents, offering a standardized API regardless of the underlying agent's SDK, with potential support for MCP and Agent2Agent protocols.

Here's a summary of the key points from the article, tailored for Hacker News readers:



- The speakers estimate AGI is still roughly 30 years away (around 2045), disagreeing with shorter timelines and emphasizing that current progress doesn't guarantee rapid future advancements.

- They argue that an "intelligence explosion" is a misleading concept, akin to calling the Industrial Revolution a "horsepower explosion," and that AGI development requires complementary innovations across various sectors, not just raw intelligence.

- They believe that while AI will become very smart, automating research and development is more difficult than commonly thought, and progress depends heavily on continued compute scaling, which faces increasing constraints.

- OpenAI's top catastrophic risk official, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, has stepped down from his role to become an intern on a healthcare AI team, marking another leadership change in the safety department.

- This departure follows a pattern of safety-focused leaders leaving or being reassigned, raising concerns about OpenAI's commitment to AI safety as it rapidly develops more powerful models.

- OpenAI released GPT-4.1 without a safety report and has been accused of reducing AI model safety testing time, further fueling concerns about the prioritization of speed over safety.

- Zuni is a Chrome extension providing an AI copilot in the sidebar, offering access to various AI models (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and tab/Gmail context awareness.

- The tool features Gmail integration for summarizing, drafting, and generally managing emails with AI assistance.

- Zuni offers a free tier with limited message credits and a Pro plan for $20/month with more credits and priority access to new models.

- Police are using AI-powered social media bots, "Overwatch" by Massive Blue, to infiltrate and engage with individuals, including "college protesters," and suspected criminals.

- These AI personas have detailed backstories and are deployed across various online channels to gather intelligence, raising concerns about privacy and potential First Amendment violations.

- While some law enforcement agencies have contracted with Massive Blue, the effectiveness of Overwatch in leading to arrests is unproven, and its use has faced scrutiny from county officials.

- OpenAI considered acquiring Cursor (Anysphere) before pursuing Windsurf, another AI coding tool startup.

- Cursor, known for its "vibe coding" capabilities and integration with models like Anthropic's Claude, gained significant traction among developers.

- Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, was reportedly seeking funding at a valuation near $10 billion.

- Silicon Witchery's S2 Module and Superstack platform aim to simplify IoT development, enabling rapid deployment of AI-powered IoT systems.

- The system offers global LTE connectivity with a data plan, remote device programming, natural language sensor queries, and automated AI insights.

- Target applications include environmental monitoring, predictive maintenance, smart agriculture, asset tracking, industrial automation, and smart cities; a pilot program is available for early access.

- Community colleges, particularly those with online programs, are facing a surge of "bot" students enrolling to fraudulently obtain financial aid, with losses in California exceeding millions.

- Professors are now burdened with identifying and removing these fake students, often using AI-generated content, which detracts from teaching and hinders access for legitimate students.

- Southwestern College faculty feel administrators haven't done enough to address the problem, while the college president says they are working on it but can't reveal specifics to avoid tipping off the scammers.

- An AI prototype was built to extract rugby game data (score, time, commentary) from video feeds, addressing the lack of contextual information in existing structured data.

- The system uses a combination of techniques: OpenAI's vision model for UI element recognition (score, clock), OCR (Tesseract) as an alternative, and Whisper for transcribing audio (referee mics, commentary).

- The project explores cost-effective methods for processing video data, including cropping images to reduce context size and considering simpler alternatives to LLMs where possible.

- BitNet b1.58 2B4T is introduced as the first open-source, native 1-bit LLM at the 2-billion parameter scale, trained on 4 trillion tokens.

- The model achieves performance comparable to similar-sized, full-precision LLMs on various benchmarks (language understanding, math, coding, conversation).

- BitNet b1.58 2B4T offers improved computational efficiency with reduced memory footprint, energy consumption, and decoding latency; model weights and inference code are released on Hugging Face.

- This article explains differentiable programming, highlighting its increasing importance beyond machine learning, particularly in fields like computer graphics.

- It details automatic differentiation (autodiff), covering both forward and backward modes, and explains how backward mode (backpropagation) is crucial for optimizing many-to-one functions common in ML and graphics.

- The article provides practical JavaScript examples to illustrate the concepts, including a demonstration of image de-blurring using gradient descent, showcasing the application of differentiable programming to solve real-world optimization problems.

- Plandex v2 is an open-source, terminal-based AI coding agent designed for planning and executing large coding tasks across multiple files, handling up to 2M tokens of context.

- It offers configurable autonomy, from full auto mode to fine-grained control, and automated debugging of terminal commands and browser applications.

- Plandex supports multiple models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, open source) and provides features like project-aware chat, version control, Git integration, and context caching for cost and latency reduction.

- AI-designed proteins show promise as a new type of antivenom, offering higher affinity, minimal cross-reactivity, and scalable E. coli production compared to traditional animal-derived antivenoms.

- Researchers used a pipeline of target analysis, RFdiffusion for binder generation, and ProteinMPNN/AlphaFold2 for optimization, resulting in binders (SHRT, LNG, CYTX) that neutralize cobra toxins in vitro, with SHRT and LNG demonstrating 100% protection in mice against lethal doses of α-neurotoxins.

- The AI-designed antivenoms exhibit high thermal stability, making them suitable for low-resource settings, and can be engineered to target multiple toxin families simultaneously, enhancing their therapeutic potential.

- OpenAI Codex CLI is a lightweight, open-source coding agent that runs in your terminal, enabling chat-driven development with the ability to execute code and manipulate files.

- It offers configurable levels of autonomy and security through approval modes (Suggest, Auto Edit, Full Auto) with sandboxing on macOS and Linux (via Docker) to mitigate risks.

- The CLI can be installed via npm (`npm install -g @openai/codex`) and requires an OpenAI API key, Node.js 22+, and supports various commands and flags for interactive and non-interactive (CI) use.

- The article indicates an error with OpenAI's o3 and o4-mini, likely a client-side issue.

- EdgeBit uses "one-shot" AI agents for automated dependency updates and code maintenance, requiring no human intervention.

- The key principles for building these agents are: using focused tools instead of generic ones, implementing hard and soft failure mechanisms, and managing the agent's persistence to avoid unproductive loops.

- Focused tools with clear boundaries, combined with hard/soft failures, ensure correctness and prevent the agent from making incorrect changes or getting stuck in endless loops, leading to more efficient and reliable automated code maintenance.

- The "Damn Vulnerable MCP Server" is a deliberately vulnerable implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) designed for educational purposes, containing 10 challenges demonstrating various security risks in MCP implementations.

- The project aims to educate security researchers, developers, and AI safety professionals about potential vulnerabilities like prompt injection, tool poisoning, and malicious code execution in MCP environments.

- The repository includes challenges of varying difficulty (easy, medium, hard) with corresponding solutions, setup guides, and documentation to facilitate learning and understanding of MCP security risks.

- A new benchmark (SWE-Lancer) evaluates LLMs on real-world freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, with tasks valued at over $1M.

- Current frontier LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, OpenAI's "o1") underperform human engineers on these tasks, but show promise in engineering management tasks like code review.

- LLM performance significantly improves with multiple attempts and increased computation time, suggesting potential for future gains.

- Bauplan offers a Python-first, serverless platform for building data pipelines and managing data lakes on S3, aiming to simplify infrastructure management for ML and data engineering teams.

- Key features include native Python workflow creation, direct manipulation of S3 tables with ACID transactions via Apache Iceberg, Git-for-data branching, serverless pipeline execution, SQL querying across versions, and CI/CD for data pipelines.

- Bauplan emphasizes data versioning and reproducibility through its "Refs" system, enabling auditing, rollback, and consistent results across pipeline runs.

- The document provides a collection of jailbreak prompts and techniques aimed at bypassing safety filters in various OpenAI models (GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, GPT-4O, GPT-3.5) and even DALL-E.

- The prompts often involve using specific formatting, dividers, leetspeak, emojis, or custom instructions to elicit unfiltered and potentially harmful responses from the AI.

- Some techniques involve encoding prompts into images (steganography) or leveraging the AI's memory and context to circumvent restrictions.