Flux
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Quoting Terence Tao

Quoting Terence Tao

I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...] We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Welcoming Daniel Scherzer to the Ecosystem Security Team

Welcoming Daniel Scherzer to the Ecosystem Security Team

When the Ecosystem Security Team was established with funding from the Alpha-Omega “Security Engineer in Residence” grant, its mission was to improve the security of all aspects of the PHP ecosystem. Under the leadership of Volker Dusch, the team has accomplished many things. As predicted, the increasing popularity of AI tools has brought an influx of security reports and PRs from the community to php-src itself. The triaging, reviewing, and handling of issues that do not fall within PHP’s…

The PHP Foundation
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem Impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize since May 24th, 2000. The discovery is somewhat overshadowed by accusations of skulduggery from Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematics professor who was collaborating on related problems with Levent Alpöge, an accomplished…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5

Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5

Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5 OpenAI's image generation models are apparently used "more than 3 billion images across ChatGPT Images and the GPT‑Image models in the API". This latest release improves their instruction-following ability across multiple turns, responds faster, and "is better at preserving the subjects in your reference photos". There are two new model IDs in the API: gpt-image-2.5-sunburst and gpt-image-2.5-flare. Based on this I think Sunburst is the stronger option: Choose…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Creepy crawlies

Creepy crawlies

Creepy crawlies Konstantin Ryabitsev discusses how bad the "background radiation" of abusive crawlers has become from the perspective of git.kernel.org, the official Git repository for the Linux kernel: TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access, including git clones. At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html. I worry about this a lot from the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Jakub Pachocki

Quoting Jakub Pachocki

The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. [...] We will need powerful, aligned AI for defense; to secure infrastructure, to protect against rogue agents in real time, and to invent entirely new protective measures. This will be a primary focus of OpenAI’s deployment efforts. At the same time, even with the uncertainty that comes from anticipated broad AI progress and the need to…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Video compressor

Video compressor

Tool: Video compressor I recorded a short demo video of my Equal Earth animation on my phone and wanted to publish an optimized version of that video (using FFMPEG) on my blog, so I had Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web build me this tool using the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG. Tags: ffmpeg, video, webassembly, claude, claude-code, claude-mythos-fable

Simon Willison's Weblog
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