Flux
Couleur d'accent
Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe. These experiments are interesting, and often throw out amusing anecdotes: During the first week of inventory, Mona ordered 120 eggs even though the café has no stove. When the staff told her they couldn’t cook them, she suggested using the high-speed oven, until they pointed out the eggs would likely…

Simon Willison's Weblog
llm-echo 0.5a0

llm-echo 0.5a0

Release: llm-echo 0.5a0 New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher. This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this: uvx --with llm==0.32a1 --with llm-echo==0.5a0 llm -m echo hi -o thinking 1 This will fake a reasoning block to standard error before returning JSON echoing the prompt. Tags: llm

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting John Gruber

Quoting John Gruber

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion. — John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI Tags: openai, y-combinator, ai, john-gruber

Simon Willison's Weblog
Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Granite team member Yousaf Shah describes the training process in detail. Unsloth released the unsloth/granite-4.1-3b-GGUF collection of GGUF encoded quantized variants of the 3B model - 21 different model files ranging in size from 1.2GB to 6.34GB. All 21 of those Unsloth files add up to 51.3GB,…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Andy Masley

Quoting Andy Masley

[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access. And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland. — Andy Masley, pushing back…

Simon Willison's Weblog
April 2026 newsletter

April 2026 newsletter

I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, both with price increases Claude Mythos and LLM security research ChatGPT Images 2.0 More model releases Other highlights from my blog What I'm using, April 2026 edition Here's a copy of the March newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!…

Simon Willison's Weblog
TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo

TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo

Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more detail. I had Claude Code build an experimental Python binding (it used ctypes) and try some malicious regular expression attacks against the library. TRE handles those much better than Python's standard library implementation, thanks mainly to the lack of support for backtracking. Tags: security,…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Redis Array Playground

Redis Array Playground

Tool: Redis Array Playground Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO, ARINSERT, ARLASTITEMS, ARLEN, ARMGET, ARMSET, ARNEXT, AROP, ARRING, ARSCAN, ARSEEK, ARSET. The implementation is currently available in a branch, so I had Claude Code for web build this interactive playground for trying out the new commands in a WASM-compiled build of a subset of Redis running in the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
How AI Swarms Are Disrupting Democracy

How AI Swarms Are Disrupting Democracy

Every day, millions of pieces of fake content are produced. Videos, audio clips, posts, articles, generated by artificial intelligence, distributed at industrial scale, aimed at shifting public opinion across entire countries. The people producing them are often outside the country being targeted. The people receiving them almost never know they’re fake. And they have no […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Quoting Anthropic

Quoting Anthropic

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Sightings

Sightings

/elsewhere/sightings/ I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I decided to add those to my blog. I built this feature on my phone using Claude Code for web, as an extension of my beats system for syndicating external content. Here's the PR and prompt. As with my other forms of incoming syndicated content sightings show up on the homepage, the date archive…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Esc