DGX Spark, Ryzen AI Max or Mac Studio: which small AI workstation makes sense?
All three hold 64 GB or more of shared memory in a small box, so they load models a single consumer graphics card cannot.
6 min read
Build with AI
APIs, automation, agents, MCP, evaluation and improvement loops.
How do you build your own language model, and which path fits your goal and budget?
Building your own model can mean anything from a free laptop exercise to a run costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, so choose by goal.
5 min read
What hardware should you buy to run AI at home in late 2026?
Buy for memory first: 16 GB runs small models, 32 GB runs today's best 27-billion-parameter coding models, and 128 GB reaches models above 100 billion parameters.
6 min read
How much do power, heat and noise really cost when you run AI at home?
Electricity is the small part: four hours a day costs roughly CA$1 to CA$3 a month on a shared-memory desktop in Québec, and up to about CA$11 on a large graphics card PC.
5 min read
Should you pretrain a model, fine-tune one or use RAG, once you count the real costs?
For almost every practical task, use RAG for facts that change and fine-tuning for consistent behavior; together they cost little.
4 min read
How do you train a small language model on a rented GPU, step by step?
Rent a machine by the minute, connect over SSH, clone Karpathy's nanochat, run a short test model for about $3, then run the full script for about $64 on eight H100 GPUs.
5 min read
What does it really cost to train a language model in 2026?
At rental prices read on November 2, 2026, a GPT-2-grade model costs about $64, a 124-million-parameter nanoGPT reproduction about $1,500, and a capable 3-billion-parameter model about $880,000 at list price.
5 min read
How do you fine-tune a small open model yourself?
Pick a small open-weight model of 3 to 8 billion parameters, prepare a few hundred to a few thousand examples of the exact input and output you want, and train a QLoRA adapter with a tool such as Unsloth or…
4 min read
Mac or PC with a graphics card: which is better for local AI?
A PC graphics card is much faster for any model that fits inside its memory, and nearly all AI software targets it first.
5 min read
How do you train a tiny language model from scratch to understand how it works?
Start with Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT example, which trains a character-level model on Shakespeare in minutes on an ordinary laptop, then move to his nanochat project, which runs every stage of a small chatbot…
4 min read
How do you use Claude Haiku 5.5 as a fast sub-agent?
Let a larger model such as Claude Sonnet 5.5 plan the job and write the final answer, and hand the many small, repetitive pieces in between to Claude Haiku 5.5, each with narrow instructions and a fixed…
4 min read
How do you move your Codex work off GPT-5.5?
GPT-5.5 left Codex on October 14 for everyone signed in with a ChatGPT account, so any default, saved setting, custom agent, scheduled task or script that still names gpt-5.5 needs a new model, usually…
4 min read
What is model distillation, and why does it make small models smarter?
Distillation trains a small "student" model to imitate a large "teacher" model, using the teacher's answers or probabilities instead of only raw data.
4 min read
How do you build with GPT-6.1 Sol in the API?
You call GPT-6.1 Sol through OpenAI's Responses API by setting the model to gpt-6.1-sol, choosing a reasoning effort, and putting the instructions you reuse at the start of every request so they can be served…
4 min read
What can AI agents that use a computer really do in 2026?
As of October 2026, a computer-use agent can look at a screen, click, type and move between ordinary apps well enough to finish routine, clearly described tasks such as filling a form from a spreadsheet,…
4 min read
Which AI workflows actually help a small business or non-profit?
The workflows that pay off are repetitive text jobs with a clear input and a person checking the output: drafting replies, summarizing meetings and documents, turning notes into forms or reports, answering…
4 min read
How do you turn a model checkpoint into a working app?
Package the weights in a safe format with a config, a version and a fingerprint, test that it gives the same numbers as the training checkpoint, then wrap it in a small server with input limits and a health…
4 min read
How do you publish and license a language model you trained yourself?
First list the rights you inherited from your base model, data and code, because they limit which licence you can honestly choose.
5 min read
How do MCP, connectors and agent-to-agent protocols fit together in 2026?
MCP is the common plug that lets one AI assistant or agent reach tools and data, connectors are the ready-made MCP links you switch on in apps like ChatGPT and Claude, and the Agent2Agent protocol (A2A) lets…
4 min read
How do you diagnose a failed training run before buying a bigger machine?
Run four cheap checks: the first loss against what guessing should give, whether the model can memorize 16 examples, how large the gradients are and where the time goes.
5 min read
What is an agent harness?
An agent harness is the ordinary software wrapped around a language model that turns it into an agent: it runs the loop of asking the model what to do next, carries out the tool calls the model requests,…
4 min read
How do you protect passwords and API keys when you build with AI?
Keep every secret out of your code and out of the AI's reach: store keys in environment variables or a secrets manager, block the agent from reading those files, and turn on secret scanning so a leaked key is…
4 min read
How do you hand off a long-running task to an agent overnight?
Write a task brief that states the outcome, the limits and how the agent will prove it is done, then make the agent keep a progress log and save a checkpoint after each step.
4 min read
How do you train an image style and speech recognition on your own machine?
For images, train a small diffusion model, then add a low-rank adapter and show it about 30 pictures of the new style; for speech, teach a small network commands and test it on voices it has never heard.
5 min read
How much memory does an AI model need, and will it fit on your machine?
Multiply the parameters in billions by the bits per weight, then divide by 8, and you get the file size in gigabytes.
5 min read
What AI can really run on your phone in 2026?
A recent phone can run models of about 2 to 4 billion parameters at a useful speed, enough for summaries, rewriting, dictation and short questions.
5 min read
Should you improve the prompt, give the AI your documents, or fine-tune a model?
Start by improving the prompt, because it is the cheapest fix and often the only one you need.
4 min read
How do you teach a model to choose tools and make decisions?
Train on examples of request and tool call, test on wordings and values it has never seen, then have ordinary code validate each call and hold risky ones for a person.
4 min read
What can you safely automate in your inbox?
Sorting, labeling, summarizing and preparing draft replies are safe to automate when the AI has only the permissions it needs and a person reviews every draft before it is sent.
4 min read
How do you teach a model a writing style without changing the facts?
Train on pairs where the facts vary and only the style repeats, include the odd cases such as missing values, then check every draft with a plain program that compares it to the source.
4 min read
When should you adapt a small language model, and when should you not?
Adapt a model to teach behaviour, such as a fixed output format, and use a lookup for facts.
4 min read
How do you fine-tune an open-weight model with LoRA?
Collect a few hundred examples of the exact input and output you want, then train a small LoRA adapter on top of a frozen open-weight model with Hugging Face's TRL and PEFT libraries.
4 min read
How do you work with Claude Opus 5 on long projects?
Give Claude Opus 5 a written plan split into small, testable pieces, have it work through one piece at a time with a commit and a progress note after each, and review at checkpoints you set in advance.
4 min read
How do you build a personal knowledge base an agent can use?
Keep your notes as plain text files in a small set of clearly named folders, add an index file that tells the agent what is where and how to behave, and give the agent access only to that folder through a…
3 min read
How do you search your own documents with embeddings, and prove that it works?
Turn each passage and each question into an embedding with a small open model, return the closest passages, then test it with questions whose right answer you know.
4 min read
When should you bring in a developer for an app you built with AI?
Bring in a developer before your app handles logins, personal data, payments or anything people rely on, and ideally before you invite your first real users.
4 min read
What does the return of the name 'plugins' mean for ChatGPT apps?
Since July 9, 2026, the ChatGPT app directory has become a plugin directory, and a plugin is now a package that can hold apps, skills and app templates.
4 min read
How do you connect an AI model to a database safely?
Give the model its own database account that can only read the few tables or views it needs, and let your code, not the model, run every query, with values passed as parameters.
4 min read
Why can a model fit on your machine and still be impossible to train?
Running a model mostly needs room for its weights, while training also needs a gradient for every weight, the optimizer's two extra copies and all the activations that must be kept for the backward pass.
5 min read
Why should you plan before you let AI write code?
Because a coding agent builds exactly what it thinks you asked for, and a short written plan (requirements, design, task list) is the cheapest place to catch a misunderstanding.
4 min read
What happens when a tiny language model learns from random weights?
It starts out knowing nothing, and its first loss proves it by matching the math of pure guessing, then it learns letters, then common words, then something shaped like sentences.
5 min read
What are hooks and permissions in coding agents?
Permissions are rules that decide which tools a coding agent may use freely, which need your approval and which are forbidden.
4 min read
How do you go from a classifier to finding objects in images?
A classifier gives one label per image, while a detector turns the same kind of network into a grid in which every cell says whether an object is centred there, where its box is and what it is.
4 min read
How do you know your model actually improved?
Compare old and new on the same untouched test set, count which examples each one alone gets right, put a confidence interval on the difference and repeat with other seeds.
4 min read
What should Agent Builder users do now that it's winding down?
OpenAI says Agent Builder and Evals will stop being available on its platform from November 30, 2026, so anyone with a working canvas agent should write down how it works now and rebuild it before then.
4 min read
How do you run Claude Code and Codex together on one project?
Give both agents one set of project rules in an AGENTS.md file, which Codex reads directly and Claude Code reads through a one-line CLAUDE.md import, then give each agent its own branch in its own git…
4 min read
How do you build a dataset that teaches the job, legally?
Start from the decision the model must make, then collect examples of real use that you have the right to use, remove personal details and duplicates, and record where everything came from.
5 min read
How do you turn a local model into a server your apps can use?
Start a server program such as Ollama, llama-server or vLLM, and it will answer on a local address using the same request format as OpenAI's API, so most apps only need a new base URL.
4 min read
What are parameters, loss and learning, and what do they look like when you watch them change?
Parameters are the numbers a model is allowed to change, loss is one number saying how wrong it is, and learning is the repeated nudge of each parameter in the direction that lowers the loss.
4 min read
How do you build a voice agent with GPT-Realtime-2?
Design the call flow first (greeting, what the agent may look up, what it must confirm, when it hands over to a person), then connect to OpenAI's Realtime API with the model gpt-realtime-2, describe your…
4 min read
How do you train your first model on any laptop, with no GPU?
Install scikit-learn, load its built-in handwritten digits, and fit a small neural network on the CPU; on one processor thread this took under half a second and reached 96.9% accuracy on images it never saw.
4 min read
How do you review code written by an AI agent?
Review it like a pull request from a fast, confident newcomer: first check the scope of what changed, then whether the tests are real and still pass on your machine, then look for secrets and new…
4 min read
How do you give an agent access to your tools without giving it everything?
List the exact tasks the agent must do, then grant the narrowest permission for each one, as a scoped, short-lived token rather than your password or a full-access key.
4 min read
Should a small business fine-tune a model or build a RAG system?
For most small businesses, start with RAG, because the usual need is for answers based on your own facts, and those facts change.
4 min read
How do you write tests first so a coding agent can check its own work?
Write small automated tests that describe the behavior you want, run them to confirm they fail, commit them, and only then ask the coding agent to write code until every test passes without touching the test…
3 min read
How do you build your own tokenizer for a language model?
Train a byte pair encoding (BPE) tokenizer: start from the 256 possible byte values, repeatedly merge the most frequent adjacent pair into a new token, and stop at your chosen vocabulary size.
4 min read
Do you still need RAG when models have huge context and memory?
For a small collection, often not: if everything fits comfortably in the context window, pasting it all in is simpler and can work well.
4 min read
How do you use GPT-5.4 mini and nano to cut costs?
Send each request to the smallest model that can handle it: a cheap first step, often nano itself, sorts requests by difficulty, nano and mini do the routine work, and full GPT-5.4 handles only the hard cases.
4 min read
How do Zapier, Make and n8n handle AI agents now?
All three now let you build an AI agent that decides which steps to take, but they package it differently.
4 min read
How do you prepare a dataset to train a language model from scratch?
Choose text whose licence fits what you plan to do with the model, then clean it, remove duplicates and personal details, shuffle it, set part aside for validation and store it in shards.
4 min read
How do you monitor scheduled AI jobs so they don't loop?
Wrap every scheduled AI job in a small guard that writes one log line per run, refuses to start when a daily run count or monthly budget is used up, and alerts you on failures, unusual spending or missing…
4 min read
How do you build a multi-agent workflow?
Split the job into stages that each have one clear goal, give each stage its own agent with narrow instructions and a fixed output format, and let your code pass the result of one agent to the next.
4 min read
How do you test an AI tool on your own tasks before you trust it?
Collect real tasks from your own work, write down for each what a good result must include, run them all through the tool, and grade the results with a fixed rubric, ideally blind and on the same cases for…
4 min read
What is agent memory, and how should an agent remember you?
Agent memory is the information an AI agent keeps beyond the current conversation, such as your preferences, ongoing projects and past decisions, stored outside the model and brought back when relevant.
4 min read
How do you use the Codex app on macOS?
Sign in with your ChatGPT account, add a project folder, and start one thread per task; each agent can work in its own copy of the code, and you review its changes as a diff before keeping them.
4 min read
How do you set up a self-improving agent loop safely?
A self-improving loop lets a model propose a better version of an agent's prompt, scores each version on a fixed set of test cases, and keeps the best one.
3 min read
How do you write a system prompt for an AI agent?
Write it as a short operating manual in labeled sections: the goal and its limits, the context the agent needs, when to use each tool, the rules it must never break, when to stop, when to hand the task to a…
4 min read
How do you use connectors in ChatGPT and Claude?
A connector is an authorized link between an AI assistant and another service, such as Google Drive or Google Calendar, so the assistant can search your files or schedule and cite what it found.
4 min read
What are prompt injection, data leaks and jailbreaks, and how do you defend against them?
A jailbreak is a user tricking an AI into breaking its own rules; prompt injection is hostile text, often hidden in a web page, email or file, that gives the AI new orders; a data leak is private information…
4 min read
How do you build an eval set from your own work?
Collect about 30 real tasks you have already done, write down for each one the input and what a good answer must contain, and choose how each will be graded, by exact match, by a short rubric, or by a model…
4 min read
What do Q4_K_M, GGUF, MXFP4 and FP8 mean, and which one should you download?
GGUF is a file format, while Q4_K_M, MXFP4 and FP8 are ways of storing each number in fewer bits.
5 min read
How do you tell whether a language model you trained is any good?
Check it at four levels: validation loss, reported as bits per byte, shows whether it learned to predict unseen text; fixed sample prompts show what that means in practice; public benchmarks compare it with…
4 min read
Which tasks are AI agents reliable at, and which still fail?
AI agents are most reliable on short, well-defined tasks with clear feedback, such as running code and checking whether tests pass, or gathering information from a few sources into a fixed format.
4 min read
How do you package a repeatable workflow as a Claude Skill?
Make a folder with a SKILL.md file whose front matter gives the skill a name and a description of when to use it, then write the steps below it and add any scripts or templates the steps refer to.
3 min read
How do you schedule an agent to run every morning?
Put the agent's script in a GitHub repository and add a GitHub Actions workflow with a schedule trigger, so GitHub's servers run it at a set time each day without your computer being on.
3 min read
How do you build an app inside ChatGPT with the Apps SDK?
You build an MCP server that offers one or more tools, register a small HTML component for ChatGPT to display, and link each tool to that component.
3 min read
How do you build an agent with Agent Builder?
In Agent Builder you draw your agent as a workflow on a visual canvas: a start point, guardrail checks, one or more agent steps with their tools, and an end, then you test it with preview runs and evals…
4 min read
How do you use GPT-5-Codex for code review?
Turn on Codex code review for a GitHub repository, then either let it review each pull request automatically when it is marked ready, or ask for a review with a comment such as "@codex review for security…
4 min read
What are sub-agents, and when should you split work across them?
A sub-agent is a helper agent that a main agent hands one focused job to; it works in its own fresh context with its own instructions and tools, then returns a short result.
4 min read
How do you write a good spec for a coding agent?
A good spec tells the agent what to build, what it must not do, and how everyone will know it is finished, ideally as tests it can run.
3 min read
How do you automate a weekly report with n8n and an AI model?
Build a short chain of n8n nodes: a Schedule Trigger set to once a week, a step that fetches the week's data, an AI step that turns it into a summary, an approval email to you, and a final send to your…
4 min read
How do you use Gemini CLI?
Install it with npm (it needs Node.js 20 or newer), type gemini in a project folder, sign in with a personal Google account, and describe what you want in plain language.
4 min read
How do you keep a human in the loop on an automation?
Add a step that pauses the workflow after the AI has done its part and before anything leaves your hands, sends the draft to a person, and continues only if that person approves.
4 min read
How do you write evals for an AI agent?
Write a set of realistic tasks, each with a check on the final state the agent should leave behind (the outcome) and, where it matters, a check on the tools it called along the way (the trajectory).
4 min read
How do you write an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md file?
Write a short plain-text Markdown file at the root of your repository that tells a coding agent what the project is, which commands build and test it, and which rules to follow; name it AGENTS.md for OpenAI's…
4 min read
Codex or Claude Code: which coding agent should you use?
Use OpenAI's Codex when you want to hand off several well-defined tasks to cloud sandboxes and review the results later, and Anthropic's Claude Code when you want an agent working beside you in your own…
4 min read
What is a coding agent?
A coding agent is an AI system that doesn't just suggest code but carries out a programming task itself: it reads your project, edits files, runs commands and tests, and repeats until the job is done or it…
4 min read
What should you do when a model update changes how your assistant behaves?
Treat it like any other change to software you depend on: confirm the change with a fixed set of test prompts, adjust your instructions or switch versions if needed, and report what you saw.
3 min read
How do you use Codex CLI in your terminal?
Install it with npm, set your OpenAI API key, open a terminal in your project folder and type codex followed by what you want done, such as "fix the failing test." It reads your files, proposes changes and…
4 min read
How do you build a generate, test, revise loop?
Write the tests first, have the model write code, run the tests automatically, and send any failures back to the model with a request to fix them, repeating until the tests pass or a round limit is reached.
4 min read
Which MCP servers are safe to install?
No MCP server is safe by default: each one is a program that runs on your computer and whose tool descriptions are read by your AI assistant.
4 min read
How do you build your first MCP server?
Install the official MCP Python SDK, write a short file that creates a FastMCP server and turns one Python function into a tool with a decorator, then open it in the MCP Inspector to check it.
4 min read
What is the Responses API, and should you move from Chat Completions?
The Responses API is OpenAI's newer way to call its models: one endpoint that takes your instructions and input, can keep the conversation on OpenAI's side, and can use built-in tools such as web search.
4 min read
How do you build an agent with the OpenAI Agents SDK?
Install the openai-agents Python package, describe each agent with a name, instructions and the Python functions it may call as tools, and run it with Runner, which handles the loop of model calls and tool…
3 min read
How do you compare AI model prices per million tokens?
Never compare the headline price alone: multiply each model's input price by the input tokens your task uses, multiply its output price by the output tokens, and add the two.
4 min read
How do you set up Claude Code in your project?
Install it with npm, open a terminal in your project folder, type claude, and sign in once with an Anthropic Console account that has billing turned on.
3 min read
What is vibe coding, and where does it break?
Vibe coding is building software by describing what you want to an AI coding assistant, accepting its changes without reading them, and pasting any errors back until the program works.
4 min read
How do you hand a web task to an AI agent safely?
Give the agent a narrow, written task with clear limits, watch it work, and take the controls yourself for anything sensitive, such as signing in, entering payment details or confirming an order.
4 min read
How do you evaluate a RAG system?
Test the two halves separately. First check whether retrieval finds the right passages for a fixed set of questions, then check whether the answers stick to those passages, and have a person review a sample…
4 min read
What is the difference between MCP and function calling?
Function calling is a feature of a model's API: you describe tools in your request, the model replies with the name and arguments of the one it wants, and your own code runs it.
4 min read
How do you connect Claude to your files with MCP?
You install the Claude Desktop app and Node.js, then add the official filesystem server to Claude Desktop's configuration file with the path of one folder you choose.
4 min read
What is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, released by Anthropic yesterday, that defines one common way for AI assistants to connect to outside data and tools.
4 min read
How do you use one model to grade another model's answers?
You give a second model, the judge, the question, the answer to check and a short written rubric, and ask it to reason against each criterion before giving a score in a fixed format.
4 min read
How do you set up a knowledge base an AI can search?
Gather the documents people really ask about, clean them into simple text, split them into short self-contained pieces, and turn each piece into an embedding so the AI can find the right passages by meaning.
5 min read
Should you let an AI control your computer?
Not your everyday computer, not yet. Anthropic's computer use beta is worth exploring, but only inside a sealed-off test machine with no personal data, limited internet access and a person watching every run.
5 min read
How do you add an AI step to a Zapier, Make or n8n workflow?
You place an OpenAI action between a trigger and the rest of your workflow, give it a clear prompt that uses fields from the trigger, and ask for output in a fixed shape so the next steps can use it.
5 min read
How does prompt caching cut API costs?
Prompt caching lets an AI provider remember the opening part of a prompt you send again and again, so later requests that start the same way are billed at a lower rate for that part.
5 min read
How do you build a voice assistant with the Realtime API?
You open a WebSocket connection to OpenAI's Realtime API, configure the session with instructions, a voice, an audio format and any tools, then stream the caller's audio in and play the model's audio replies…
4 min read
How do you schedule recurring AI jobs with cron and an API?
Write a small script that does one bounded job, such as summarizing the latest items from a feed in a single API call, and let cron, the standard Unix scheduler, run it at a fixed time.
3 min read
Is fine-tuning GPT-4o worth it for your project?
Fine-tuning GPT-4o is worth it when you have a narrow, repeated task, a few dozen to a few hundred good examples, and a careful prompt that still misses on tone, format or domain rules.
4 min read
How do you get reliable JSON from a model with Structured Outputs?
Describe the exact shape you want as a schema, send it with strict mode turned on, and the reply will match that shape every time unless the model refuses or runs out of tokens.
4 min read
How do you build an AI agent without writing code?
You describe the job in plain language, connect the apps the agent may use, and decide exactly which actions it can take on its own, using a no-code tool such as Zapier Central or a custom GPT in ChatGPT.
4 min read
How do you use GPT-4o mini to cut API costs?
Send most of your requests to GPT-4o mini, which costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, and keep the larger GPT-4o only for the requests that truly need it.
4 min read
How do you build an AI agent step by step?
Build it in six decisions: a narrow goal, a short list of tools, a loop that lets the model call those tools through function calling, a memory for what it has learned, firm stop rules, and a log of every…
3 min read
What is an agent framework, and do you need one?
An agent framework is a code library that supplies the plumbing every AI agent needs, such as the think-act-observe loop, tool definitions, memory and the hand-offs between several agents, so you write less…
4 min read
When should you use a GPT, and when the Assistants API?
Build a GPT when the people who need your assistant already use ChatGPT and you want something working this afternoon without code.
4 min read
How do you prepare training data to fine-tune GPT-3.5 Turbo?
You write example conversations in OpenAI's chat format, each one a system message, a user message and the ideal assistant reply, and save them one per line in a JSONL file.
3 min read
What are evals, and how do you test a prompt before you trust it?
An eval is a fixed set of test inputs, each paired with what a good answer must contain, that you run through a model to score how well a prompt or system performs.
4 min read
What is Ollama, and how does it let you run AI models on your own Mac?
Ollama is a new free, open-source tool, first released as an early preview on July 8, 2023, that downloads and runs open large language models on your own computer with one short command, such as "ollama run…
4 min read
How do you build a weather assistant with function calling?
You describe a weather function to the model in JSON Schema, let gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 reply with the arguments it wants to use, run the real weather lookup in your own code, and send the result back so the…
3 min read
How do you build a chatbot that answers from your own documents?
You split your documents into short passages, turn each passage into an embedding, and for every question retrieve the few passages closest in meaning, then paste them into the prompt and tell the model to…
4 min read
What is a vector database, and do you need one?
A vector database stores embeddings, the lists of numbers that represent the meaning of text or images, and quickly finds the stored items whose numbers are closest to a query.
4 min read
What is prompt injection?
Prompt injection is an attack where text written by someone other than the app's builder, typed into a chat or hidden in a web page, email or document, gives a language model new instructions that override…
4 min read
How do you build a simple agent loop with the OpenAI API?
An agent loop asks the model to write a thought and one action in a fixed text format, your program reads that action, runs the matching tool, and sends the result back as the next message.
4 min read
What is an AI agent, and how is it different from a chatbot?
An AI agent is a program that gives a language model a goal, a set of tools such as web search or file writing, and a loop that lets it choose and carry out one step after another until it decides the goal is…
4 min read
What is Auto-GPT, and how does an AI that sets its own next step work?
Auto-GPT is a free, open-source Python program released on 30 March 2023 that gives GPT-4 a goal and lets it decide its own next steps, such as searching the web, reading pages, saving notes and writing…
5 min read
What is llama.cpp, and how can a large language model run on a laptop?
llama.cpp is a small open-source program, released on GitHub on March 10, 2023 by Georgi Gerganov, that runs Meta's LLaMA language models in plain C/C++ on an ordinary computer's processor.
4 min read
What is a system message in the ChatGPT API?
A system message is the first message in a ChatGPT API conversation, written by the developer rather than the user, that tells the model who it is, what it should do and how it should behave.
4 min read
How do you write code comments that guide an AI coding assistant?
Write the comment or docstring as a small specification before the code: what goes in, what comes out, the edge cases, and one or two examples.
4 min read
How do you teach an image model a new face or style?
You show the model a handful of photos, usually three to five, of the one subject or style you want, and run a short training step that links those pictures to a new word you can then use in prompts.
4 min read
How do you filter harmful content with OpenAI's moderation endpoint?
You send each piece of text to OpenAI's Moderation endpoint, a free classifier released on August 10, and it tells you whether the text is flagged for sexual, hateful, violent or self-harm content.
4 min read
How do you call the GPT-3 API from a spreadsheet?
In Google Sheets you can write a small custom function in Apps Script that sends a cell's text to the OpenAI API and returns GPT-3's reply into the cell.
3 min read
How do Make and Zapier compare for a first automation?
Zapier and Make, the new name for Integromat, both connect apps without code, but they count usage differently: Zapier charges a task for each action that runs, while Make charges an operation for every…
4 min read
What is an API key, and how do you keep it safe?
An API key is a secret code that identifies you to a service such as the OpenAI API, so every request made with it is billed to your account.
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What are embeddings, and how do they power search by meaning?
An embedding is a long list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text, so that texts with similar meanings get similar numbers.
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How does fine-tuning GPT-3 work?
Fine-tuning trains a private copy of a GPT-3 model on your own examples, each one a prompt paired with the completion you want, so the model learns your task and style instead of reading them from a long…
4 min read
How do you turn a plain-English request into working code with Codex?
Write your request as the opening of the file you want, in comments that name the language, the pieces and the edge cases, then let Codex continue it.
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What is OpenAI Codex, and can it really write code?
OpenAI Codex is a descendant of GPT-3 trained on natural language and billions of lines of public code, and since August 10, 2021 an improved version is available in private beta through the OpenAI API.
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What is no-code automation, and how do Zapier and Integromat work?
No-code automation means connecting the apps you already use so that an event in one, such as a new form entry, automatically causes actions in others, without writing a program.
4 min read
What can you build with the GPT-3 API?
With the GPT-3 API you can build almost any tool whose input and output are text, from a style rewriter or a question-answering helper to a chatbot character or a code sketch made from a plain description.
4 min read
What is the OpenAI API, and who can use it?
The OpenAI API is a new web service, announced on June 11, 2020, that lets software send text to OpenAI's GPT-3 family of models and get a continuation back.
3 min read