Search: “simon-willison”

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI Gemini finally caught up on Felony Bench! The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run b

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before: An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s sy

Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for runni

GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is 'rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as thro

Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI Gemini finally caught up on Felony Bench! The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run b

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

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

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,

I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It's slow,

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider t

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

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

**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

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

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use 'all of the capacity of their

We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5, which is currently being trained at COLOSSUS II), while also providing access to select compute

xai-org/grok-build, now open source xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to

Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid) While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs, a 'self-contained terminal

Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing? Excellent piece of work by Dylan Castillo, who took a deep-dive into the frequently pondered question of whether the AI labs have been deliberately training models to draw

My comment on Devtools must be open source (exe.dev) — Hacker News.One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so fa

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

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, 'with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities'. It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears

The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Accidental cyberattacks by OpenAl and Anthr

DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new m

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 7

Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat a

Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face. Th

Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev, their first example of a new category of model that they are calling 'System One models' (I'm with Maggie Appleton, I think 'decision models' is a better name for t

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

DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Goog

This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance, describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark region

Open letters about AI development I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well. Open Weights and Ame

Tool: CORS Chat I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an Ope

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for runni

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is 'a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4'. It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so fa

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