Simon Willison's Weblog: Quotations

Quoting Dean W. Ball

2026-06-26T22:25:46+00:00

This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics:

Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub-frontier, competition emerges, and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work.

The ongoing AI infrastructure buildout—the one that is, according to former US AI Czar David Sacks, essential to the US economy, assumes a functionally global total addressable market for US AI services. No one is building $100 billion dollar data centers to serve frontier models to whatever 100 companies the US government will allow access. [...]

— Dean W. Ball, 35 thoughts on what has happened and what America should do

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic

Quoting Timothy B. Lee

2026-06-26T21:15:09+00:00

This is like saying there's no learning curve to being a manager because your employees will just do whatever you tell them to do.

— Timothy B. Lee, on the idea that LLMs take no skill and have no learning curve

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms

Quoting OpenAI

2026-06-26T17:10:43+00:00

We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost. [...]

We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. [...]

GPT‑5.6 is priced per 1M tokens across three model sizes: Sol is $5 input / $30 output; Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output; and Luna is $1 input / $6 output. GPT‑5.6 also introduces more predictable prompt caching, including support for explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life. For GPT‑5.6 and later models, cache writes are billed at 1.25x the model’s uncached input rate, while cache reads continue to receive the 90% cached-input discount.

— OpenAI, Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model

Tags: openai, generative-ai, llms, llm-pricing, llm-release, ai-security-research, gpt

Quoting Tom MacWright

2026-06-24T18:13:51+00:00

In the last few months, I've started to see [job applications] that were clearly cowritten by an LLM, link to an LLM-generated portfolio site, which then links to LLM-generated GitHub projects, with purely LLM-generated commit messages. [...]

My other reaction is that I don't know anything about these people.

They haven't put themselves out there. They haven't said anything true. [...]

The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools.

— Tom MacWright, Accidental anonymity

Tags: careers, ai, tom-macwright, ai-misuse

Quoting Sean Lynch

2026-06-19T22:45:49+00:00

The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...]

Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.

— Sean Lynch, comment on Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, model-context-protocol, skills

Quoting Charity Majors

2026-06-17T17:12:41+00:00

What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.

— Charity Majors, AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

Tags: ai, charity-majors, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

Quoting Georgi Gerganov

2026-06-16T16:04:59+00:00

I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful tool for a maintainer. I think I would be using it much more, if I didn't have to spend a lot of my time on reviewing PRs. Currently, I have a very lightweight harness - the pi agent with everything stripped (pi -nc --offline) and a short system prompt to align it a bit with my style.

— Georgi Gerganov, Hacker News comment on Running local models is good now by Boykis

Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, ai-assisted-programming, qwen, coding-agents, georgi-gerganov, pi

Quoting Matteo Wong, The Atlantic

2026-06-16T03:07:54+00:00

Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved IT experts asking Fable to help find and patch bugs. When given deliberately insecure code, she said, Fable refused the prompt “review the code for security issues” but then complied when asked to “fix this code,” followed by some further manual steps. Moussouris told me that this was just “the model working as intended” for cyberdefense.

— Matteo Wong, The Atlantic, The White House Is Ratcheting Up Its War Against Anthropic

Tags: jailbreaking, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, ai-ethics, ai-security-research, claude-mythos

Quoting Julia Evans

2026-06-15T02:05:19+00:00

[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend.

— Julia Evans, write for 1 person

Tags: writing, julia-evans

Quoting Andrew Singleton

2026-06-12T18:09:21+00:00

Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.

— Andrew Singleton, AI Economics for Dummies

Tags: ai

Quoting Jeremy Howard

2026-06-10T15:23:34+00:00

Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement:

The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI

But everyone else should have access to it.

By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance.

It also has the critical benefit of avoiding a dangerous power imbalance.

Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try.

This means the AI frontier advances, & power imbalance increases.

(To be clear, I don't think we should try to slow down recursive AI self improvement - I think we should open it up and democratize it as much as possible. My point is: if you claim we should slow down, and you have the best model, you should ensure your org can't use it.)

— Jeremy Howard, in a Twitter thread

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, jeremy-howard, anthropic, ai-ethics, claude-mythos

Quoting Andrej Karpathy

2026-06-09T19:03:10+00:00

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref).

— Andrej Karpathy, on Claude Fable 5

Tags: ai, andrej-karpathy, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, jevons-paradox, claude-mythos

Quoting Andreas Kling

2026-06-05T11:10:05+00:00

We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...]

A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...]

Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

— Andreas Kling, Changing How We Develop Ladybird

Tags: open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, andreas-kling, ladybird, ai-ethics

Quoting Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media

2026-06-04T16:38:29+00:00

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

— Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Tags: google, journalism, ai, ai-ethics

Quoting Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews

2026-05-31T01:48:12+00:00

Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales ⁠from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 12, and add the two together.

— Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews, citing "a person familiar with the matter"

Tags: ai, anthropic