Simon Willison
AI news source. Articles are auto-selected and adapted by Hamidun News editors.
Latest publications
Three Open Letters in Five Days: Microsoft, Anthropic and 1,324 Developers on Open-Weight Models
235 companies led by Microsoft and 1324 AI lab employees published open letters on the fate of open-weight models — and Anthropic's position diverges sharply.
Linus Torvalds on AI in Linux: a useful tool, and dissenters can fork
Linux creator Linus Torvalds says the kernel will not be an anti-AI project: AI is a useful tool, and anyone who disagrees can fork the project or leave.
Thinking Machines Releases Inkling, an Open 975B-Parameter MoE Model
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has opened the weights of Inkling, a 975B-parameter multimodal MoE model trained on 45T tokens, under Apache 2.0.
Are AI Labs Training Models for the "Pelican on a Bicycle" Test? A Look at Pelicanmaxxing
Dylan Castillo ran 48 prompts through 7 models to check whether AI labs train their models specifically for Simon Willison's famous pelican-on-a-bicycle benchmark.
Ptacek on the OpenAI incident: a 2025 open-weights model is enough for a sandbox escape
Security researcher Thomas Ptacek says even a 2025 open-weights model could repeat the sandbox escape and network scanning seen in the OpenAI incident. No frontier model required.
Codex Bug: GPT-5.6 Deleted Users' Files — OpenAI Explains the Cause
OpenAI investigated reports that its Codex coding agent running GPT-5.6 deleted users' files. The cause: the model tried to override $HOME and accidentally wiped the home folder.
Claude Tag Closes 65% of the Claude Code Team's PRs, and the System Prompt Was Cut by 80%
At AI Engineer World's Fair, the Claude Code team said Claude Tag closes 65% of its PRs and that the Claude Code system prompt was cut by 80% for Fable 5 and Opus 4.8.
AI Mania Is Breaking Corporate Decision-Making: Billion-Dollar Strategies Written Without Ever Opening ChatGPT
Consultant Nik Suresh describes how AI hype is warping decisions at large companies: $2 billion AI strategies written by executives who have never once opened ChatGPT.
Kimi K3 Refuses to Reveal Its System Prompt and Answers With Sarcasm
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 wouldn't let a user extract its hidden instructions and took a sarcastic jab instead, an exchange developer Simon Willison spotted.
Claude Code Now Runs on Bun Rewritten in Rust: Startup 10% Faster
Simon Willison confirmed that since version 2.1.181, Claude Code uses the Bun runtime rewritten from Zig to Rust. Startup on Linux is about 10% faster.
Sam Altman's 2022 Letter: OpenAI Considered Open Source to Choke Off Competitors
The Musk v. Altman case has surfaced Sam Altman's October 2022 letter to OpenAI's board: a GPT-3-class open model was meant to make it harder for rivals to raise money.
AI coding agents have made reverse engineering cheap: an observation from Simon Willison
Simon Willison notes that AI coding agents have cut the cost of writing code so far that reverse engineering home devices is shifting from a rare hobby to routine.
Alibaba Open-Sources Qwen 3.8 Max, a 2.4 Trillion-Parameter Model: Why the US Fears Chinese Models
Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 Max with open weights and 2.4T parameters, reversing its May refusal to open 3.7 Max, as Xi Jinping urges open source and the distillation debate heats up.
Moonshot Releases Kimi K3, the Largest Open Model Yet at 2.8 Trillion Parameters
Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter model and the largest open model to date. It beats DeepSeek V4 Pro on size but carries a record price for a Chinese lab: $3/$15 per million tokens.
Simon Willison Built an LLM Cliché Detector on Fable 5
Simon Willison's LLM cliché highlighter flags about 11 stock phrases that give away AI-generated text, from "no fluff, no filler" to "worth naming."
Anthropic brings Claude Fable 5 back to Max and Team Premium subscriptions from July 20, 2026
Anthropic has scrapped its plan to pull its flagship Claude Fable 5 from subscriptions: from July 20, 2026, it is included in Max and Team Premium plans as competition from GPT-5.6 Sol mounts.
Nativ: Run AI Models Locally on a Mac With MLX, an Alternative to LM Studio
Developer Prince Canuma has released Nativ, a macOS app that runs AI models locally on Apple MLX, with a chat interface and a localhost API server like LM Studio.
Simon Willison's sqlite-utils 4.0 adds database schema migrations
Developer Simon Willison released sqlite-utils 4.0—a CLI tool and Python library for SQLite—with schema migration support.
OpenAI released flagship model GPT-5.6 in three versions — Luna, Terra and Sol
OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in three versions — Luna, Terra and Sol — and claimed that the senior model outperformed Claude Fable 5 by 13.1 points on the agent tasks test.
ChatGPT Work and Codex: OpenAI tries to explain where conversations are stored
OpenAI released a product guide for ChatGPT Work and Codex, trying to explain the difference between cloud and desktop conversations — but the explanation turned out confusing.
Simon Willison used GPT-5.5 to create a web component for embedding GitHub code
Developer Simon Willison demonstrated an experimental github-code web component that embeds code snippets directly from GitHub pages — the code was written by the GPT-5.5 model.
Simon Willison Releases llm 0.31.1 with Tool Call Bug Fix
Developer of the open-source llm CLI tool Simon Willison released version 0.31.1, fixing a bug in tool calls with empty arguments.
Tencent Open-Sourced LLM Hy3 with 295 Billion Parameters
Tencent released LLM Hy3 under Apache 2.0 license — a model with 295 billion parameters (21 billion active) with 256K context, competing with much larger open models.
Meta Launches Muse Spark 1.1 with Public API and Tool Calling Improvements
Meta introduced Muse Spark 1.1 — the first version of its AI model to receive public API access with enhanced agent capabilities and automation features.
OpenAI Introduced GPT-Live — Updated Voice ChatGPT with GPT-5.5 Support
OpenAI launched GPT-Live — an updated voice mode for ChatGPT that can delegate complex tasks to GPT-5.5.