Search: “simon-willison”

I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I bui

Everyone is very concerned about being respectable, so I’m going to be the goofball who raises worst-case possibilities. I think there is a 1% chance we live in Minicrypt, and a 15% chance we function

Release: ttok 1.0 I released ttok 0.4, ran uv tool upgrade ttok, piped a file into the new version... and realized that it was defaulting to the GPT-4 tokenizer when it should very clearly default to

Release: ttok 0.4 ttok is my CLI tool for counting tokens, using OpenAI's open source tiktoken library. It hasn't been in updated in a couple of years, but I finally fixed a Click warning, updated CI,

Simon Willison released the **“llm-openai-decisions”** plugin (version 0.1a0) on October 7 , 2026. The lightweight library lets developers send prompts directly to OpenAI’s new Jev‑clone decision mode

As previously promised, here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5. The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year ago, and was priced

OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects Given how tempting a target wikis are for rogue agent swarms, it's not a huge surprise that Wikipedia found evidence of that activity once t

I've always been kind of into computers since I was young. And then when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. And the visual effects workflo

I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over

My comment on EmbeddingGemma 2 — Hacker News.I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license. For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed

Here's a benchmark that uses Lilypond https://x.com/aug5thmusic/status/2096030719156089029 GPT-6 Astra has the best result yet on the Bach Benchmark. Its chorale contains no voice-leading errors, and

Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk Mistral are back in the game. Today they're releasing a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter, 49 billion active parameter model trained on their own

**llm-mistral 0.16** is a language‑model plugin that provides programmatic access to Mistral models via the official Mistral API. It exposes wrapper functions for sending requests, receiving responses

Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0 OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API, as previously announced at last week's DevDay. Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I

Mistral can pelican now! https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F0db8b8196e57711b352f6c5857cf5b35#response-1 Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Cho

My comment on Mistral Large 4 — Hacker News. wren6991: The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars. OK well I couldn't resist this one

One thing I'd LOVE to understand is how Claude 'knows' what the music from Secret of Monkey Island sounds like Maybe Anthropic crawled a whole bunch of online music discussion forums with text-based r

Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not sup

Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so I tried this: I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the musi

I re-ran an experiment @colin_fraser ran against GPT-4o a while back to see how good it was at adding long numbers, only this time I tried Qwen 3.8 27B running locally in both reasoning and non-reason

The 'old' version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reason

Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could 'compute the sum but return the answer in wo

I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: More Fable class models A pricing war 3D

[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandb

My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News.I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2

I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the 'creat

We evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Myt

Claude Sonnet 5.5 New Sonnet model from Anthropic today. They say it 'runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work' - it's priced the same as Sonnet 5 but appears to beat it on every bench

To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models when it came to “cyber” or “swarming” or “message boards” or anything else related to the incidents is an und

Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating. Worse,

The most important thing about Sonnet 5.5 is that it's now the model that powers the free tier on https://claude.ai - so all of this stuff can be done by free users ChatGPT's free tier is still GPT-5.

Simon Willison defines “Fable class models” as a lineage of generative AI systems that began with Claude Fable 5, progressed to Claude Opus 5.5, and later included GPT‑Astra 6 (with a possible additio

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything t

Tool: Kākāpō Party I presented a closing keynote for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America yesterday. As a STAR moment I decided to weave in references to the record breaking kākāpō breedin

Muse is getting a lot of attention — including mine — because it’s both groundbreaking technically (each user gets their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta’s cloud) and because it’s packag

I just had a voice conversation with the Datasette backup of my blog via datasette-mcp, which you can now talk to using the ChatGPT iPhone app Massive QoL update: ChatGPT Voice can now use plugins AND

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requir

Tool: Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground Google released two new Gemini text-to-speech models today - gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts. They come with a library of over 2,000 voices, plus the

SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and in

The new Gemini 3.8 TTS models are super-cheap and can generate conversations between multiple voices (from 2,000+, or you can clone your own) - I built a little UI for it, then had Claude knock up a s

Big model release today - I wrote about Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna - plus comparison grids of pelicans by the different model families at different reasoning levels https://simonwillis

Yesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It's going to ta

GPT-6 Luna is half the price of 5.6 Luna, which was already an astonishingly cheap model given how capable it is Luna is my favorite model for building product features thanks to its cost (and speed)

Release: llm 0.36 New OpenAI models: gpt-6-sol for GPT-6 Sol and gpt-6-luna for GPT-6 Luna. #1702 Model plugins can now declare supports_conversation = False for models that only accept single-turn pr

**llm-anthropic 0.29** is a software package that offers programmatic access to Anthropic’s large language models, including the Claude series. It handles authentication, API requests, and response pa

Release: llm-typesafe 0.1a0 I built this new plugin for LLM to add support for TypeSafe AI's new Jev model. Install it like this: llm install llm-typesafe Then set an API key (get one here, the waitli