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Simon Willison

@simonwillison.net

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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/

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Simon Willison·Jul 10

If you ask the new Grok (via grok.com without any custom instructions) for opinions on controversial topics it runs a search on X to see what Elon thinks I know this sounds like a joke but it's not. This genuinely happens: x.com/jeremyphowar...

Screenshot of Grok web interface showing a query "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only." with the AI's thinking process displayed, including "Thought for 42s", analysis stating "The user likely wants a simple stance, but the issue's complexity suggests caution" and "I'm considering searching for recent views to inform my response", followed by a "Planning research approach" section mentioning searching for "Elon Musk's stance on the conflict to guide my answer" and noting "The response must be one word, so no citations will be included", with a search interface showing "Searching × for 'from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)'" displaying results including "@elonmusk" accounts, "Israel", "29 × posts", "10 web pages"
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Simon Willison·Aug 29

An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/...

Since I love collecting questionable analogies for LLMs, here's a new one I just came up with: an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia. They have a huge array of facts compressed into them but that compression is lossy (see also Ted Chiang). The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters. This thought sparked by a comment on Hacker News asking why an LLM couldn't "Create a boilerplate Zephyr project skeleton, for Pi Pico with st7789 spi display drivers configured". That's more of an lossless encyclopedia question! My answer: The way to solve this particular problem is to make a correct example available to it. Don't expect it to just know extremely specific facts like that - instead, treat it as a tool that can act on facts presented to it.
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Simon Willison·Jul 18

MIT Technology Review wrote about my dystopian backup plan USB stick

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Latest posts

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Simon Willison·3d

This "Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs" by Mo Bitar perfectly captures the current moment www.tiktok.com/@atmoio/vide...

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Simon Willison·4d

"old woman possibly damp faster than an old woman should be"

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Simon Willison·4d

Wrote about today's GitLab restructuring / "workforce reduction" announcement, and ended up digging around in version control for both the GitLab and the 37signals public employee handbooks to help illustrate my thoughts simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/...

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Simon Willison·4d

New TIL: I figured out how to use my LLM CLI tool in a shebang line, which means you can write executable scripts in English, or hook up more complex scripts with a snippet of YAML template - til.simonwillison.net/llms/llm-she...

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Simon Willison·4d

This is excellent. I particularly like the definition of the "Zombie Internet", which starts: "It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI [...]"

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Simon Willison·May 9

Mission accomplished: tap danced in the big community college dance recital for the second time

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Simon Willison·May 8

Just realized that the reason I like TikTok so much is that it's lightning talks! I've always loved lightning talks

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Simon Willison·May 7

Under-reported details of the xAI/Anthropic Colossus data center deal: Anthropic get Colossus 1 but xAI keep using the larger Colossus 2, Colossus 1 has a REALLY bad environmental record, and xAI just shut down a bunch of older models on 2 weeks' notice simonwillison.net/2026/May/7/x...

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Simon Willison·May 6

I'm at the Claude w/ Code event in San Francisco, and I'll be live blogging the keynote here: simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/c...

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Simon Willison·May 6

I was talking with Joseph Ruscio on the @heavybit.com podcast the other day when I realized that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to blur a bit in some of my work - I published some extracts from the transcript simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/v...

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