New Workbench is out: AI Is Becoming a Compiler for Intelligence: The smartest use of intelligence is figuring out where you can get away with being stupid. www.libertyrpf.com/p/ai-is-beco...
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Who pays for the AI that US workers use on the job? We found that most AI use at work happens on free plans, except in science and tech, where employers are more likely to pay for premium access.
What are the big questions about AI capabilities that govern the impact AI will have on the world? In this Gradient Update, Greg Burnham lays out his top questions, and how he thinks Epoch's work on benchmarking can help answer them.
Google announces that they can train AIs on sensitive data using homomorphic encryption. Really interesting how this might relate to current debates around requiring companies to scan for CSAM, which people have argued could make encryption legally problematic. 1/2 blog.google/security/how...
Watching Silo genuinely makes me want to hook up some generative AI abomination that rewrites every frame to make it look like they turned the lights on
Continuing to scale AI compute at recent rates will require exponentially more capital. Is financing a bottleneck? Probably not yet. That’s the takeaway from a new Gradient Update by Campbell Hutcheson, which analyzes nearly $50B of debt associated with Anthropic’s buildout.
A consequence of how frontier models are trained is motivated reasoning, a phenomenon well studied in humans and discussed in this podcast from Palisade Research.
For anyone using LayerCake, I'm in the process of doing an update to using Svelte 5 runes internally (the example components were updated last year but some internals remained). Here's the PR for any thoughts you might have on the proposed design: github.com/mhkeller/lay...
global ai development in a nutshell www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Dy...
Thanks to the video from the Black Hat security conference of OpenAI's presentation about "The Hugging Face Incident" we now have a detailed timeline of what happened from OpenAI's perspective - I wrote up the details here, it's pretty wild simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/7/o...
New details shared at Black Hat conf about OpenAI hacks. The models created an internal message board and shared tips with one another www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/openai-...
One of the things the pelican benchmark is still useful for is visually representing (to a tiny extent) the improvements in a single model family Here's Meta AI's Spark (8th April), Spark 1.1 (9th July), and Spark 1.2 (today, 5th August) simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/5/m...
Just had to create an "accidental-cyberattacks" tag on my blog We're up to four now: the original OpenAI+Hugging Face one, Anthropic's me-too attacks, then two new ones from the UK AI Safety Institute and Irregular that OpenAI reported yesterday simonwillison.net/tags/acciden...
Four years ago today I tweeted a concept for a "Raccoon Heist" video game, product description generated by GPT-3 and concept "art" created by DALL-E Today I fed those assets into Fable 5 and had it build full working game, single shot prompt, no feedback from me simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/5/r...
Another real-world manifestation of the misaligned actions frontier systems developed by leading companies can take to achieve goals:
Big new release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library for talking to hundreds of different LLMs - reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses support, server-side tools, smarter logging and a whole lot more simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/4/n...
The MiniMax-H3 video generation model is a lot of fun - here's what I generated on my M5 Pro Mac for the prompt "a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket" (~115GB model download, took around 45 minutes to generate) - notes on how I ran it here simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/4/m...
Here's my attempt at summarizing the various "open letters" about AI development that have been doing the rounds over the past few weeks simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/2/o...
Got a disappointing pelican from DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 at default reasoning mode - on the left - but then I bumped reasoning up to high (via OpenRouter) and got the much better one on the right simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/...
The new stateless MCP specification has rekindled my interest in MCP, and inspired some new projects, including mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/...
I've been working with Prime Radiant building a new tool for running small eval suites against models, harnesses, and prompts - it's called "smevals", you can try it with "uvx smevals docs", and I wrote about it here: primeradiant.com/blog/2026/sm...
1000+ scientists at frontier AI companies are speaking out to warn that the current commercial race leads to unacceptable security risks. I agree with their call for an international effort to develop technical and governance guardrails to ensure a safer way forward. www.pacingthefrontier.com
LawZero is pleased to announce that it has received a donation of computing resources from NVIDIA to support its research in developing safe-by-design AI solutions. Read the announcement: lawzero.org/en/news/lawz...
LoiZéro est ravi d'avoir reçu un don en ressources de calcul de NVIDIA pour soutenir ses recherches dans le développement de solutions d’IA sécuritaires dès la conception. Lire l’annonce: lawzero.org/fr/nouvelles...
A new TIL on adding custom MCP servers to both the ChatGPT and Claude regular chat interfaces - it's a little less obvious than I had hoped, but I got there in the end til.simonwillison.net/llms/mcp-in-...
eBay will pay $56 million to the couple behind EcommerceBytes. The company tried to silence their coverage with a harassment campaign, including sending shipments of live cockroaches and a bloody pig mask. A portion of the $$ will go to First Amendment charities www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/t...
Librarians hosting anti-AI workshops say "the anti-AI movement isn’t about rejecting technology altogether so much as it is about advocating for more control, agency, and freedom in how people use technology" techcrunch.com/2026/07/25/l...
Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...
The Thinking Box: We taught AI to think out loud. Now we have to avoid teaching it what not to say. www.libertyrpf.com/p/the-thinki...
Ruff 0.16.0 - Astral's fast Python linter - came out a few days ago and increased the number of default-enabled rules from 59 to 413, which highlighted all sorts of problems across my projects (1618 in sqlite-utils alone) simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/25/...
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