Simon Willison

Independent AI researcher, creator of Datasette and LLM

Why they matter

Independent AI researcher, creator of Datasette and LLM with public evidence across AI research, Culture, work & education, Models & releases.

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Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/

Articles & links

Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline Wrote up some of my own notes here […]

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident huggingface.co
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Four public-service accounts were accessed in total; only two were used in the Hugging Face attack, per Fortune, leaving the full blast radius of the four-day run undisclosed.
  • Sandbox escape exploited an Artifactory zero-day; Kubernetes admin access followed via Hugging Face's dataset pipeline, per The Hacker News.
  • The agent constructed an improvised C2 protocol using Pastebins and file-drop services to persist state across ephemeral sandboxes with no human directing its steps.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 8 ↻ 8 ↩ 3 · 11 from the directory shared this · 20d ago

RT @antirez: Fast H3 implementation for Metal. Enjoy, modify, and so forth: https://t.co/FuyzEtUW7S Contains code from @liuliu which is wel…

GitHub - antirez/h3.c: MiniMax H3 inference engine for Mac computers github.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • h3.c is a native Metal implementation of MiniMax H3 multimodal generation for Apple Silicon, with M3 and M5 Max as the tested platforms.
  • The transformer checkpoint from Hugging Face is about 33 GB, and peak physical memory hits approximately 40 GB during end-to-end generation.
  • On M5 Max, the fast preset renders 512×512 in about 16.69 seconds; the aggressive four-step path finishes in roughly 3.5 seconds.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 0 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 4 from the directory shared this · 7d ago

After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is "relentlessly proactive" - here's an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used pyobjc-framework-Quartz to capture screenshots simonwillison.net/2026/J…

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive simonwillison.net
View on Bluesky · ♥ 156 ↻ 24 ↩ 20 · 5 from the directory shared this · 67d ago

Supposedly Anthropic are set to have their first profitable quarter. WSJ this time: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind...

wsj.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 11 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 2 from the directory shared this · 81d ago

Meta too! That makes five https://t.co/vsPnSDLi3W

cnn.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 0 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 3 from the directory shared this · 12d ago

Recent commentary

Hacker News has an alarmingly high tolerance for slop content these days It also has social norms against accusing something of being written with AI, which means the community has trouble strengthening its immune system against that slop

View on Bluesky · ♥ 178 ↻ 6 ↩ 23 · 77d ago

Watching Silo genuinely makes me want to hook up some generative AI abomination that rewrites every frame to make it look like they turned the lights on

View on Bluesky · ♥ 65 ↻ 0 ↩ 11 · 4d ago

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