Simon Willison

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is an open‑weights multimodal Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) model previewing the architecture of Qwen4. It contains 125 B tokens with only 6 B active, giving a performance boost. The author has tested it on a DGX Spark with Unsloth quantized models, exploring variants like UD‑IQ1_S and UD‑Q2_K_XL, and highlighted a high‑reasoning‑effort example from UD‑Q2_K_XL.

Simon Willison
Oct 6

Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk

Mistral has released a preview of its new Mistral Large 4 model, a 1 trillion‑parameter, 49 billion‑active‑parameter language model trained on a cluster of 3,800 NVIDIA Grace‑Blackwell GPUs. The preview is available through their API, with two reasoning levels—"none" and "high"—and the company plans to release the open‑weights version by the end of the month. In preliminary tests, the model scores 38 on Artificial Analysis, outperforming last year’s Mistral Large 3 and approaching the performance of larger competitors.

Simon Willison
Sep 4

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison tested GPT‑6 Astra by generating SVG pelicans riding bicycles at various reasoning levels and compared the results to GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. The Astra pelicans consistently outperformed the other models, especially at low and xhigh reasoning levels, and even the Astra max version produced high‑quality images. Astra also used fewer tokens and was roughly twice as expensive as Sol, yet its low‑level output was cheaper and superior to any Sol model.

Simon Willison
Oct 12

llm-meta-ai 0.2

The article announces the release of llm-meta-ai 0.2, featuring Meta AI’s new Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full models, described as the most capable models yet. These models are suggested to be Meta’s first Fable‑class models, with Artificial Analysis scoring Muse Wonder (Max) equivalent to GPT‑6.1 Sol. The author updated the llm-meta-ai plugin to support the new model and provides pelican‑drawing benchmarks across six reasoning levels, noting significant improvements over previous releases.

Simon Willison
Oct 6

Mistral Large 4

The article is a comment by Simon Willison on the Mistral Large 4 model, posted on Hacker News. He discusses the saturation of benchmarks and humorously references a benchmark involving an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars, comparing the performance of several large language models including Claude Opus, GPT, Gemini, and Mistral Large 4.

Simon Willison
Oct 23

Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro

Simon Willison announces the release of Kimi K3.1 Pro on the Kimi API, noting it is not yet open‑weights but full weights will be available by Nov 4 2026. The model offers a high‑speed variant 2‑3× faster at double the price, with US dollar pricing of $2.00/million input tokens and $10/million output tokens—matching GPT‑6.1 Sol and half the cost of Claude Opus 5.5. Benchmarks from Moonshot show Kimi roughly on par with Opus 5.5 and GPT‑6 Astra, scoring 55 in Artificial Analysis, ahead of several competitors.

Simon Willison
Sep 22

Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war

The article reports the release of new AI models: Claude Opus 5.5 by Anthropic and GPT‑6 Sol and GPT‑6 Luna by OpenAI, noting that GPT‑6 variants are priced at half the cost of their GPT‑5.6 counterparts. It provides a detailed pricing table comparing input, cached input, and output costs across several models, highlighting how GPT‑6 Luna is among the cheapest ever offered by OpenAI. The author also comments on visual differences in model outputs, noting that GPT‑6 outputs are more muted compared to GPT‑5.6.

Simon Willison
Oct 13

llm-gemini 0.35

The article announces the release of llm‑gemini 0.35, adding support for the new Gemini 4 Argon model available through the Gemini API and for customers on the $100/month subscription plan. It highlights Argon’s pricing—$2/million input and $10/million output at launch, with a planned price increase on December 1st—and compares its cost-effectiveness to other models, noting it remains cheaper than many competitors even after the increase. The post also showcases example SVG outputs and creative illustrations generated by Argon, such as a pelican riding a bicycle and an armadillo in fishnet tights on Mars.

Simon Willison
Sep 2

llm-gemini 0.34

The release of llm-gemini 0.34 introduces the new Gemini 3.8‑Flash model, available in low, medium, and high thinking levels, and fixes an issue where async responses failed to record the resolved model version. The update also notes that Google has released Gemini 3.8‑Flash (and a restricted 3.8 Flash Cyber version) today, with example outputs (pelicans) demonstrating the model’s performance across the different thinking levels. The author highlights Gemini Flash’s speed, low cost, and competence in generating HTML, JavaScript, and Markdown‑SVG content, citing a 13‑second, 1.8‑cent example of an HTML output.