April 2026 newsletter
I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: Opus 4.7 and GPT-
Knowledge catalogue
I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: Opus 4.7 and GPT-
A Redis pull request (#15162) that introduces significant new features or improvements, with comprehensive documentation of the changes available in the GitHub PR discussion.
Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Gr
I had Claude Code for web build me this WebAssembly playground for trying out the new Redis array commands https://tools.simonwillison.net/redis-array More notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/M
I tried running the same 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' prompt against 21 different quantized variants of the same IBM Granite 4.1 3B model - the results weren't as interesting as I h
New Redis data type just dropped - arrays, accessible by index, with a new text grep search mechanism [blog post] Redis array: short story of a long development process => https://antirez.com/news/164
[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. No
Tool: Redis Array Playground Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO, ARINSER
Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more deta
We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ide
I added a new feature to my blog (built entirely on my phone with Claude code for web) that imports my iNaturalist photos and adds them to my site's overall timeline https://simonwillison.net/2026/May
/elsewhere/sightings/ I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I
Tool: iNaturalist Sightings I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone us
Codex CLI 0.128.0 adds /goal The latest version of OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent adds their own version of the Ralph loop: you can now set a /goal and Codex will keep on looping until it evaluates t
Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities The UK's AI Security Institute previously evaluated Claude Mythos: now they've evaluated GPT-5.5 for finding security vulnerability and found it t
It's a common misconception that we can't tell who is using LLM and who is not. I'm sure we didn't catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fun
Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. Eng
We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps Matt Webb: I would love an RSS web feed for all those various tools and apps pages, each item with an “Install” button. (But install to where?) The les
I released LLM 0.32a0 this morning, a major backwards-compatible refactor of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for working with language models - the new changes should help LLM work better with reas
LLM 0.32a0 is an alpha release of Simon Willison's LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing large language models, featuring consequential architectural changes. The release includes two key chan
I just released LLM 0.32a0, an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I've been working towards for quite a while. Previous versio
@sarah_edo I had a fantastic conversation a few months ago about WebMCP as accessibility technology I hadn't thought about it before but it feels like a great opportunity to massively increase the uti
Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that the
Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a '13B langua
This post discusses Simon Willison's experience testing an AI system's image generation or creative capabilities, noting that while it failed to produce a specific imaginative request (a pelican on a
Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that the
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. — OpenAI Codex base_instruct
Some notes on talkie, a new 'vintage language model' from a team including Alec Radford (yes, that Alec Radford) 'trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text' https://simonwillison.net/
Talkie is a project created by the developers @status_effects, @DavidDuvenaud, and @AlecRad. Based on the creator names and context, this likely refers to a conversational AI tool or application, thou
What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns! Richard Si describes an excellent set of upgrades to Python's default pip tool for installing dependencies. This version drops support for
This post references a quote from Matt Levine, a financial columnist known for his sharp commentary on finance and markets, shared by Simon Willison on X (formerly Twitter). Without access to the spec
Here's a uv one-liner that downloads and runs the MLX model against a local mp3 file uv run --with mlx-audio python -m mlx_audio.stt.generate --model mlx-community/VibeVoice-ASR-4bit --audio lenny.mp3
@idarbek Having your backups on the same vendor as your production database puts you at risk of your vendor banning your account for some reason (like billing messups, or detected CSAM in user-uploade
Microsoft's MIT licensed VibeVoice speech-to-text model (think Whisper with speaker diarization) is really good - my notes on running the 5.71GB 4bit MLX conversion on an M5 MacBook, using about 60GB
microsoft/VibeVoice VibeVoice is Microsoft's Whisper-style audio model for speech-to-text, MIT licensed and with speaker diarization built into the model. Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 b
This post by Simon Willison references a 'perky little fella' related to MiMo-V2.5, likely describing a small or compact AI model or component from the MiMo framework/project version 2.5. Without acce
Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices I just encountered this feature via a 'try this out now' prompt in a Google Meet meeting. It kind-of worked! This is Google's imp
The conclusions here feel wrong to me. The two lessons I see are: 1. Don't run agents anywhere they might be able to access production environment credentials - it's on you to know which credentials t
Today OpenAI announced that 'Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress' That 'independent of OpenAI’s technology progress' frag
For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft's commercial IP rights to OpenAI's technology would be null and void. Tha
Simon Willison inquires about running DeepSeek-V4-Flash on Mac hardware, specifically asking about feasibility across different RAM configurations from 512GB down to smaller amounts. This reflects dis
GPT-5.5 prompting guide Now that GPT-5.5 is available in the API, OpenAI have released a wealth of useful tips on how best to prompt the new model. Here's a neat trick they recommend for applications
Simon Willison posted a blog entry reflecting on a notable or surprising development in technology or software, capturing a moment he considered worth documenting for his audience. The post's title 'w
Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore. GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, a
@scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark: I feel like we need to stack these tests now I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the 'WHY ARE YOU LIK
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.
... and there's me thinking that sending it out at 9pm Pacific Time on a Thursday evening was safe, surely there wouldn't be any news this evening that I might want to include in there... https://x.co
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V
Simon Willison requested that Hugging Face add a repository size sorting option to help users find and filter models by storage requirements, specifically mentioning interest in locating DeepSeek quan
This post references a Hugging Face Models page filtered to show quantized versions of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash model, a lightweight variant of DeepSeek's V4 language model. The page displays community-q
Important: it has been confirmed that ChatGPT Images 2.0 added the 'Why are you like this' sign of its own accord https://x.com/scottjla/status/2047545918665449844 @i_am_brennan @simonw Yes, it did! 🤣
This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding i
Release: llm 0.31 New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model: llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418 New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models: -o verbosity low. Values are low, medium, high. New option for se
More of my notes on DeepSeek V4 - the really big news is the pricing: both DeepSeek-V4-Flash and DeepSeek-V4-Pro are the cheapest models in their categories while benchmarking close to the frontier mo
russellromney/honker 'Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics' for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It
Serving the For You feed One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom 'feed' implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom alg
The people do not yearn for automation This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket. It’s a
These pelicans are kind of angry looking! Left is deepseek-v4-flash, right is deepseek-v4-pro - both generated using OpenRouter via my LLM tool 🚀 DeepSeek-V4 Preview is officially live & open-sourced!
This week's edition of my email newsletter features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new c
GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually