Q&A with Simon Willison on the November release of GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5 as the inflection point for coding, exhaustion due to managing coding agents, and more
Simon Willison is a prolific independent software developer, a blogger, and one of the most visible and trusted voices on the impact AI is having on builders.
Q&A with Simon Willison on the November release of GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5 as the inflection point for coding, exhaustion due to managing coding agents, and more
Simon Willison is a prolific independent software developer, a blogger, and one of the most visible and trusted voices on the impact AI is having on builders.
Some LLM takeaways for 2025: reasoning as a signature feature, coding agents were useful, subscriptions hit $200/month, and Chinese open-weight models impressed
It's that time. It's been a hell of a year. — At the start we barely had reasoning models. X: Simon Willison / @simonw : Here's my enormous round-up of everything we learned about LLMs in 2025 - th...
GPT-5.2 models have a 400K context window and 128K max output tokens, like GPT-5 and 5.1, but have an August 31, 2025, knowledge cutoff, vs. September 30, 2024
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Newsletter :
Google launches Gemini 3 Pro Image, aka Nano Banana Pro, with more control, improved text rendering, and enhanced world knowledge, for free in the Gemini app
except when it gaslit me Ryan Whitwam / Ars Technica : Google's new Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini 3 power to generate more realistic AI images Robert Hart / The Verge : Google's new AI image creator too...
Nano Banana Pro is great at following instructions, generates interim “thought images”, and makes full infographics with well-rendered text from a short prompt
Simon Willison / Simon Willison's Weblog :
Nvidia DGX Spark hands-on: trades performance and bandwidth for 128GB of unified memory, the ecosystem is a big selling point, the design is standard, and more
What It Means for NVDA Stock and AI Crypto Sentiment Maximilian Schreiner / The Decoder : Early reviews suggest Nvidia may have found another way to sell its chips with the DGX Spark Robert Brown / Im...
Alibaba releases the Qwen3-VL vision models, the Qwen3Guard “safety moderation” models, and three closed-weight models, including Qwen3-Max with 1T+ parameters
Qwen 50.6k — Safetensors qwen3_vl_moe Julian Nabil / Forbes Middle East : Alibaba Introduces Qwen3-Max AI Model With Over 1T Parameters Markus Kasanmascheff / WinBuzzer : Alibaba Releases Qwen3-VL O...
White House says the $100K H-1B fee will not apply to renewals or existing H-1B holders re-entering the US, only to future applicants in the February lottery
not $100K toll booths. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick / @reichlinmelnick : They need to PUT THIS IN WRITING. Because right now it's anonymous officials versus the actual words in the actual ban on entry that ...
GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT is shockingly good at search and demonstrates the potential of combining tool calling with chain-of-thought reasoning
“Don't use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years... until it wasn't. — I wrote about how good OpenAI's o3 was at using … X: @simonw , @simonw , and @simonw Mastodon: @remixt...