Simon Willison’s Weblog

Hack Your Summer. I learned about this initiative from DJ Patil this morning:

It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want to build something real this summer.

You’ll learn how to identify a project, make steady progress, get support from mentors and peers, and create tangible, public-facing work you can actually show future employers.

Hack Your Summer is partly a reaction to the internship crisis facing US college students this year. There are way fewer available internships than usual, as companies have reduced their hiring ambitions and teams have less capacity to coach interns.

Hack Your Summer provides an alternative path for the many students who didn't catch one of those rare internships.

A second (free) cohort starts on July 13th, and the deadline for students to apply is July 8th. They're also accepting volunteers to help mentor the students.

# 7:26 pm / careers

Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding. This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce.

[...] with variants including 9B Dense, 31B Dense, 35B MoE, and 397B MoE. Built on top of pretrained Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5, it achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models of comparable size on coding benchmarks.

As far as I can tell the licenses of those underlying models is compatible with being used in this way - Gemma 4 is Apache 2.0 licensed (and not bound by the janky additional Gemma Terms of Use that afflicted the previous Gemma models) and Qwen 3.5 is Apache 2.0 licensed as well.

I've been running the model using LM Studio and the ornith-1.0-35b-Q4_K_M.gguf (20GB) GGUF, hooked up to Pi. Initial impressions are very good - it seems to be able to run the agent harness over many tool calls in a proficient way.

Here's a terminal session where I asked it to "find the code that decodes the actor cookie" and then "find the code that opens the insert dialog when thebutton is clicked" against a Datasette checkout, which it handled with ease.

I also had it draw this pelican, which came out at 103 tokens/second:

It's a little bit mangled but the pelican is clearly a pelican.

I couldn't find much information about DeepReinforce themselves. The earliest paper I could find from the was CUDA-L1: Improving CUDA Optimization via Contrastive Reinforcement Learning from June 2025.

# 4:17 pm / ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gemma, llm-release, lm-studio

The AI Compass (via) This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit.

I'm impressed that my answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer", patron saint myself!

It's implemented as a single page React app using the <script type="text/babel"> trick to avoid the necessary build step. Here's the code.

# 5:39 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics

What’s new in Claude Sonnet 5 (via) Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning. I always head straight for the "what's new" developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official announcement post.

Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is close to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices". The system card helps explain how they were able to release the model without being blocked by the US government:

Sonnet 5 is significantly less capable at cyber tasks than Mythos 5: its safeguards are thus similar to those we apply to Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8 (models that are more capable than Sonnet 5 but much less capable than Mythos 5).

Of note from the "what's new" API changes:

• Sampling parameters temperature, top_p, top_k are no longer supported.
• It has a 1 million token context window and 128,000 maximum output tokens.
• It features "the same set of tools and platform features as Claude Sonnet 4.6"
• Adaptive thinking is on by default, unless you specify "thinking": {type: "disabled"}.
• The pricing is the same as Sonnet 4.6: $3/million input, $15/million input, with an introductory discount to $2/$10 until 31st August. But...
• The model has a new tokenizer, where "The same input text produces approximately 30% more tokens than on Claude Sonnet 4.6." - effectively a 30% price increase.

I used my Claude Token Counter tool to try out the new tokenizer. Here are my results for several larger documents:

So the new token is roughly 1.4x times more expensive for English, 1.33x for Spanish, 1.28x for Python code and effectively the same cost for Simplified Mandarin.

Here's the pelican. It's nothing to write home about. Sonnet 5 thinks it looks like a goose.

# 9:23 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release

Nano Banana 2 Lite (via) Also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API), this is the "fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale".

I used AI studio to run this prompt:

Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio

I like that one better than the results I got from the other Nano Banana models when I tried this back in April. It spelled Forest Festival wrong in two different ways though.

# 10:15 pm / google, ai, generative-ai, llms, gemini, text-to-image, llm-release, nano-banana