Import AI 475: Swarm scaling; Google DeepMind watermarks biology; and the AI science economy
Who chooses what AI gets to do?
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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
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
Latent Space [AINews] not much happened today
a quiet day.
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
Latent Space Inside-Out AI: Rebuilding Airbnb Behind the Scenes and Across the Guest Experience
After leading Meta’s Llama models, Ahmad Al-Dahle is now transforming Airbnb with AI — from how its teams develop products to how it serves guests.
Latent Space [AINews] Pi 1.0, Pi Durable, and AIE NYC
the minimalist harness goes stable... and TypeScript!
Latent Space Academia is for Ambition — Alex Zhang, MIT
We catch up with RLM first author Alex Zhang, MIT PhD, on Jev, PhD masxing, and the future of harnesses.
Latent Space [AINews] Gemini 4 Argon: GDM’s answer to Astra/Fable, with 1M output
... but you can’t try it yet unless you are “government users and trusted cyber defenders in the Fairwind Program”
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
Latent Space Why Dwarkesh is Wrong about Computer Use + How OpenAI shipped its Jev competitor in 1 Week
Our DevDay coverage - the first pod on the DevDay lineup - dives in with the leaders of OpenAI’s CUA team and API platform.
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
Latent Space [AINews] OpenAI DevDay 2026: Dots, 6.1 Sol, Ultrafast, Decisions API, Agents API, Spaces, Marketplace, and 1.2 Billion ChatGPT WAU
the most confident DevDay yet.
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
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
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
Import AI Import AI 474: Platonic mindspace; TPUs in space; Zhipu starts an outer RSI loop
Where do you exceed the capabilities of an LLM?
Import AI Import AI 473: The US's superintelligence strategy; human brain in a mouse skull; and machine hermeneutics
Is the wall AI is hitting in the room with us right now?
Import AI Import AI 472: DeepMind's cheating math agents; populist AI policies; and Forethought theorizes a nightwatchman
Plus, a machine hermeneutics story