Simon Willison

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

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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.

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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
6h ago

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.