Search: “simon-willison--x”

Claude Opus 4.7 with adaptive thinking via the API... am I missing something or is it not possible any more to force it to think? (Prompt hacks like 'think step by step' don't count here, I mean the e

I came up with a somewhat foolish new benchmark for testing image generation models, to exercise the new ChatGPT Images 2.0: 'Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham

Simon Willison expresses hope that OpenAI will commit to long-term maintenance of an AI tool, citing concerns about his own tool potentially becoming stale or discontinued. The post reflects broader u

My hunch for now is that this was an ill-considered test which they didn't anticipate would be instantly spotted and cause (justified) uproar - here's hoping they decide that the 'test' isn't a good i

OK, here's a resolution - I managed to get it to think using these settings: 'thinking': { 'type': 'adaptive', 'display': 'summarized' }, 'output_config': { 'effort': 'max' } Without 'display': 'summa

OpenAI's new Euphony tool works almost exactly the same way as my Codex transcript viewer https://tools.simonwillison.net/codex-timeline?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.githubusercontent.com%2Fsimonw%2Fa9eb599

This piece thinks that the reason I got a crap pelican riding a bicycle from Opus 4.7 is that it didn't think about it first, I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to force it to think that I've m

OpenAI has been using multiple informal names internally and externally for its new image generation model, including 'ChatGPT Images 2.0,' 'Image gen 2,' and 'gpt-image-2.' The post highlights incons

'I am envisioning a harmonious interplay of form and space, where each element finds its rightful place within the visual narrative. The pelican emerges as a central figure, its wings poised in dynami

Claude Opus 4.7 uses approximately 8% more tokens than Opus 4.6 when processing the same text-heavy PDF document, as demonstrated by a test comparing tokenization of a 15MB, 30-page PDF (60,934 tokens

Important to note: that 3x increase for images is entirely due to Opus 4.7 being able to handle higher resolutions. I tried that again with a 682x318 pixel image and it took 314 tokens with Opus 4.7 a

Simon Willison shared an experience attempting to use X's Community Notes feature to add clarification to his own tweet, experimenting with whether the self-noting functionality would work as intended

Simon Willison shared a tutorial on integrating Datasette instances with Google Sheets, demonstrating multiple methods including the importdata() function, custom named functions, and Google Apps Scri

Note to @AnthropicAI - much as I appreciate the public system prompts this would be so much more valuable to me as a Claude power user if you published the tool descriptions as well Since Anthropic pu

Simon Willison documents the differences between Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 system prompts, analyzing changes that Anthropic made public. The notes likely highlight modifications to model beh

The biggest challenge of using chat-based AI systems is that the details of what they can do are invisible - those tool descriptions are the missing manual, publishing them would be a huge benefit to

PyCon US 2026 will be held in Long Beach and will feature new dedicated tracks focused on AI and security topics. The announcement comes from Simon Willison, highlighting these expanded programming ar

The event is next month - talks are Friday 15th to Sunday 17th of May, with the date before that of tutorials and two days afterwards of sprints Californians are notoriously last-minute planners so I

Simon Willison discusses the perception that LLMs and coding agents are primarily useful for greenfield development (starting new projects from scratch) rather than for maintaining and modifying large

A https://claude.ai/ feature I really like is you can tell it to 'clone x/y from GitHub' and it can then answer questions about a repo, or use snippets of code from that repo to help build new artifac

This post compares the performance of Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B and Claude Opus 4.7 models on a creative task of generating SVG code for a flamingo riding a unicycle, likely demonstrating differences in their

Simon Willison discusses results from a 'flamingo on a unicycle' test on his blog, likely comparing AI model performance including Qwen. The post appears to reference previously undisclosed or unconve

I ran the same prompt for a London Estuary accent, a Newcastle accent and an Exeter, Devon accent - all three audio files are now embedded in my blog post https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/15/gemini-

I'm certain this isn't the message they intended to present, but this comes across to me as a company saying 'we no longer trust in our own ability to keep your data secure' Open source is dead. That’

@pumfleet @calcom Did you see this piece by @dbreunig? He argues that the cost of locking down software through LLM analysis makes open source MORE valuable now: https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/cy

Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS (text-to-speech) model includes a notably elaborate or extensive example prompt, which Simon Willison highlighted as noteworthy. The post likely comments on the complexit

Finally some good news from @simonw: The Kākāpō parrots of New Zealand are having a fantastic breeding season. Media 'Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a so

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't Jud

ChatGPT's voice mode, when directly queried about its knowledge cutoff date, reports April 2024, indicating it is powered by a GPT-4o era model rather than a more recent one. GPT-4o initially had ...

I care because understanding which index helps me understand things like what I need to submit content for crawling to, what search agents I should allow in robots.txt, how frequently I can expect the

Pelicans for Meta's new Muse Spark models - plus I did a bit of a deep dive into the Code Interpreter and fascinating 'container.visual_grounding' tools in their http://meta.ai chat UI https://simonwi

The feature I most want from AI labs right now is documentation on which underlying search engines they use when their chat tools run a search OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta AI all have search and I ha

754B parameters, 1.51TB on Hugging Face Introducing GLM-5.1: The Next Level of Open Source - Top-Tier Performance: #1 in open source and #3 globally across SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench, and NL2Repo.

Simon Willison tested Z.ai's GLM-5.1 using his standard 'pelican on a bicycle' SVG benchmark, and the model stood out by spontaneously generating a full HTML page with both the SVG and a separate ...

Wrote up some thoughts on Anthropic's Project Glassing, where their latest Opus-beating model is available to partnered security research organizations only Given recent alarm bells raised by credible