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  1. Simon Willison

    Qwen3.8 27B addition in words

    Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results: I'm confident GPT-4o didn't cheat and use a calculator, especially since it got so many of the calculations wrong, but I was inspired to run the experiment again on local hardware (a DGX Spark) to explore the effect in a fully controlled environment. I pasted his image into a Codex Remote session (GPT-6 Astra) and had it run the same experiment using Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf . Here's the result for a run of 30 attempts per combination with reasoning disabled: Then I ran it again with reasoning enabled. This took a lot longer per pair, so instead of running 30 samples per square I ran just one - which results in a much less visually appealing heatmap since each square is either 100% or 0%: It got the right answer in 167 out of 169 attempts, and since these were one-shot I'm confident a second run would produce different results here. Here's a version of the report that includes the reasoning traces from

  1. Simon Willison

    We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

    Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps . I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, "after $X/month, send me a warning email", will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of spinning up code that can do useful things. Sometimes those things cost money - calls to paid APIs, or hosted web applications, or systems that can bill for additional storage and compute. Nobody wants to wake up to an email sent at midnight warning about a budget limit and find that, while they slept, their rogue service had consumed several hundred (or several thousand) more dollars of usage. An argument against this is that businesses don't want their hosted applications to start throwing errors because some budget was exceeded. I expect that most businesses and individuals would prefer errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill. I think hard budget caps need to be the default. If someone wants to live

  2. Simon Willison

    September sponsors-only newsletter

    I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: More Fable class models A pricing war 3D graphics, Blender, and pixel art LLMs come for mathematics So many more accidental cyberattacks The vulnapocalypse comes for Datasette What I'm using right now My software releases this month 2026 in LLMs (so far) Here's a copy of the August newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Tags: newsletter

  1. Simon Willison

    Rex's Dino Store

    Museum: Rex's Dino Store Located just before the turnstiles in the Grand Army Plaza subway station at the north end of Brooklyn's Prospect Park is this former newsstand which is now operated by a dinosaur. The density of dinosaur puns is exceptional . Tags: art , new-york

  1. Simon Willison

    Quoting Matthew Green

    [...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared package cache, and those instructions changed what the recipients did. Replace the package cache with email, Slack and shared documents or WhatsApp, and replace independently-sandboxed training runs with independently-deployed personal agents like Muse, and you have exactly the ingredients that a worm needs. — Matthew Green , Is sandboxing sufficient to contain rogue agents? Tags: accidental-cyberattacks , ai-misuse , generative-ai , ai-security-research , sandboxing , ai , llms

  2. Simon Willison

    He Built This City

    I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model , the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard. It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely make a priority to see it if you get the chance. Tags: museums , new-york

  1. Simon Willison

    Quoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team

    We evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Mythos Preview did so in 6%. Although GLM-5.3 performs below Claude Mythos Preview here, a meaningful threshold has clearly been crossed: earlier models, like Claude Opus 4.6 and GLM-5.2, do not succeed in any of them. — Anthropic Frontier Red Team , GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities Tags: anthropic , generative-ai , ai-security-research , glm , ai , ai-in-china , llms

  2. Simon Willison

    GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price

    My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News. I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv... Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... They're not notably different from the GPT-6 family pelicans: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr... Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , gpt

  3. Simon Willison

    Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

    Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out. It uses Google's MediaPipe C++ library, compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision , plus the BlazeFace face detection model. Tags: photography , tools

  1. Simon Willison

    OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog

    I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , coding-agents , live-blog , openai-devday