LLM

We have some actual numbers on tokens! In their commentary on the latest earnings report, Microsoft report: We processed over 100 trillion tokens this quarter, up 5X year-over-year – including a record 50 trillion tokens last month alone So we’ve got a baseline, and can estimate a growth rate. Assuming exponential growth and a three month token split of 19/31/50 we get 62% month on month growth, or, if it keeps going 100 T → 424 T → 1.8 P → 7.6 P, which is lower than the 5x yoy growth MS quote. ...

As Andy Massick explains well, if you are making a few requests per day to a simple non-reasoning text based AI model the carbon impact is, to use a technical term, bugger all 1. I probably ask ChatGPT and Claude around 8 questions a day on average. Over the course of a year of using them, this uses up the same energy as running a single space heater in my room for 2 hours in total. Not 2 hours per day, just a one-off use of a single space heater for 2 hours […] By being vegan, I have as much climate impact as not prompting ChatGPT 400,000 times each year ...

Today’s fun is setting up the new Zapier MCP integration. This creates a MCP server that allows Claude Desktop or Cursor or anything else that supports MCP to call any Zaps Setting Up Zapier MCP Step 1: Install mcp-remote First, install the mcp-remote package using npm: npm install mcp-remote Step 2: Configure MCP Endpoint in Claude Desktop In Claude Desktop, you’ll need to add the Zapier MCP endpoint to your settings. Add the following configuration to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json ...

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized approach for structuring context information when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). It was introduced by Anthropic but is standardised and an open protocol. Yeah, great. But what does that even mean? The problem that MCP is trying to solve is one of getting access to local/specialist information. When using Claude or ChatGPT etc, the model has access to its built in knowledge from training, but this only contains public information and will have a cut off date when the model was trained. To get around this, some tools have integrated web search that can add extra knowledge and/or the ability to import documents. But what if you want to talk to a database? Or files on disk? Or a knowledge base? Or … ...

Now Deep Research is available to ChatGPT users on the £20/mth tier, I’ve had a chance to experiment. The tl;dr is that it’s really very good, and the level of progress in just 6 months is mind-blowing. I picked something I know about - financial pressures facing UK Universities. First, I asked ChatGPT to generate the prompt for Deep Research, using this template I found via a mailing list (and I can’t remember which one). ...