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Don’t Automate Your Moat: Matching AI Autonomy to Risk and Competitive Stakes

Don’t Automate Your Moat: Matching AI Autonomy to Risk and Competitive Stakes

I was talking to a senior engineer at a well-funded company not long ago. I asked him to walk me through a critical algorithm at the heart of their product, something that ran hundreds of times a second and directly affected customer outcomes. He paused and said, “Honestly, I’m not totally sure how it works. […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Socket Has Acquired Secure Annex

Socket Has Acquired Secure Annex

Today I'm excited to share that Socket has acquired Secure Annex, the extension security company founded by John Tuckner. John is joining Socket, and we’re excited to have him here. John has spent the last year doing some of the sharpest work anywhere on extension security, building Secure Annex into a product that security teams at Reddit, Brave, Torq, and Movable Ink depend on. He did it as a solo founder, which makes what he shipped even more impressive. The research he's published on…

Socket
What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns!

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns!

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns! Richard Si describes an excellent set of upgrades to Python's default pip tool for installing dependencies. This version drops support for Python 3.9 - fair enough, since it's been EOL since October. macOS still ships with python3 as a default Python 3.9, so I tried out the new Python version against Python 3.14 like this: uv python install 3.14 mkdir /tmp/experiment cd /tmp/experiment python3.14 -m venv venv source…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Meet the new Executive Director of The PHP Foundation

Meet the new Executive Director of The PHP Foundation

There’s a certain kind of energy that comes from being in a room full of people who care deeply about what they do. Next month at PHP Tek, developers from across the community will gather to share ideas, learn from one another, and push the craft forward. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it, […] The post Meet the new Executive Director of The PHP Foundation appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Architect
Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a "13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text". talkie-1930-13b-it (26.6 GB) is a checkpoint "finetuned using a novel dataset of instruction-response pairs extracted from pre-1931 reference works", designed to power a chat interface. You can try that out here. Both models are…

Simon Willison's Weblog
microsoft/VibeVoice

microsoft/VibeVoice

microsoft/VibeVoice VibeVoice is Microsoft's Whisper-style audio model for speech-to-text, MIT licensed and with speaker diarization built into the model. Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 but I hadn't tried it until today. Here's a one-liner to run it on a Mac with uv, mlx-audio (by Prince Canuma) and the 5.71GB mlx-community/VibeVoice-ASR-4bit MLX conversion of the 17.3GB VibeVoice-ASR model, in this case against a downloaded copy of my recent podcast appearance with Lenny…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause

Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause

For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft's commercial IP rights to OpenAI's technology would be null and void. That clause appeared to end today. I decided to try and track its expression over time on openai.com. OpenAI, July 22nd 2019 in Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI (emphasis mine): OpenAI is producing a sequence of increasingly powerful AI technologies,…

Simon Willison's Weblog
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