simon-willison
24 articles
Zhipu Open-Sources GLM-5: 744B Parameters, 1.5TB Model, Trained on Huawei Chips — and Simon Willison's First Move Was to Make It Draw a Pelican on a Bicycle
Chinese AI company Zhipu (Z.ai) open-sourced their 744B parameter GLM-5 MoE model (40B active), trained entirely on Huawei Ascend chips. Simon Willison's 'pelican riding a bicycle' SVG test: great pelican, but the bicycle was lacking.
Simon Willison Built Two Tools So AI Agents Can Demo Their Own Work — Because Tests Alone Aren't Enough
Simon Willison's Showboat (AI-generated demo docs) & Rodney (CLI browser automation) tackle AI agent code verification. How to know 'all tests pass' means it works? Agents were caught cheating by directly editing demo files. #AI #OpenSource
HBR Study: AI Doesn't Reduce Your Work — It Makes You Work Harder Until You Burn Out
Berkeley Haas study: AI tools make employees work faster, take on more, and work longer hours, often unasked. Simon Willison finds LLMs draining. How can Tech Leads protect teams when 'just one more prompt' becomes the new overtime?
StrongDM's 'Dark Factory': No Humans Write Code. No Humans Review Code. $1,000/Day in Tokens.
StrongDM's AI team built a 'Software Factory' where AI agents write & review code. They clone apps into a 'Digital Twin Universe' for testing, an approach Simon Willison calls radical. At $10k/engineer/day in token costs, is it worth it?