Introducing the Afghanwire Dataset: A Unique Collection of Translated Afghan Media Articles from 2006-2009

My previous two blog posts — here and here — were trending / on the front page of Hacker News, driving over 20,000 new visitors to this blog. Welcome! I learned a few new tricks (and some mistakes I’d made) during the ensuing discussion so I thought I’d share some of these here. Some of them might trigger some mini side-investigations into...

I previously experimented with one-click LLM finetuning providers and now is a good time to return to the core of the matter: evaluating how well all these fine-tuned models and experiments are faring. I have a gut feeling that my fine-tuned models did pretty well, but we’re not in the business of gut feeling so I’m hoping to be able to put some...

The last post in this series showed that finetuning an LLM needn’t be particularly difficult. I used axolotl to produce finetuned versions of Llama3, Mistral and TinyLlama models. During the course we were given a bunch of credits by various companies in the LLM and finetuning space. Among those were credits from some finetuning-as-a-service...

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably visited the Huggingface website and you’ve almost certainly tried out one of their ‘Spaces’. These are deployed mini-applications hosted on Huggingface infrastructure. I’ve created spaces of my own, and at work I added a way for people to quickly deploy a ZenML server as a ‘Space’. I love browsing all...

Yesterday I published two datasets to the Hugging Face Hub and I wanted to briefly add some context to them and what they might be useful for. TL;DR: I wrote a paper in 2011 that used international military forces’ press releases about Afghanistan military operations to gain an understanding of what was going on on the ground. The paper was...