Sunday, 16th August 2026
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it. I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
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 running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive.
[... 2,543 words]I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again.
It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a problem that I needed to solve!
The tool is very simple. Navigate to markdown-svg-renderer in your browser and paste in some Markdown to see it rendered... or save that Markdown to a CORS-friendly URL or a GitHub Gist and paste in a URL to that document.
The URL option will give you a bookmarkable page, for example https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2F6f9e48293be5c916652d29f0dc0b0657 - which bakes in the URL to this Gist.
If you visit the Gist you'll see raw SVG:
In the rendered tool that looks like this instead:
As you can see, that SVG block in the Markdown has been transformed into a rendered SVG (in this case animated) plus several tabs.
The tabs are the really fun bit. The PNG and JPEG tabs render that SVG to those image formats in the browser and lets you copy or download them - useful for sharing on platforms that don't support SVG directly.
The MP4 tab is new today - it examines the SVG to see if it contains any animations, attempts to guess how long the looped video should be, then renders a whole bunch of frames of the animation and loads 30+MB of ffmpeg.wasm so it can compile those frames into an MP4 video using the full power of FFMPEG compiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser.
Being able to turn an animated SVG into a MP4 again makes it easy to share on platforms that can't support SVG animation natively. It's a neat trick!