Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B , an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 16 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May , but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a problem that I needed to solve! The tool is very simple. Navigate to markdown-svg-renderer in…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 16 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 16 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Tool: CORS Chat I built this today ( with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh ) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and both work fine. Conversations are persisted in the browser and can be exported as…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 15 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Some podcasts are self-recommending enough that I look to break them down if I have the chance.
Summary published by Don't Worry About the Vase · 15 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
! I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solution. Tell the model to output tags without any details of the existing vocabulary, then use vector embeddings against the existing corpus to find the…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 14 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2.1 Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2 . I'd introduced code that looks like this: from typing_extensions import Self It turned out the typing-extensions package was not listed as a dependency for sqlite-utils - it was installed by one of the other dependencies in the dev dependency group , but when you uvx sqlite-utils directly you don't get those dependencies. As…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2 Lots of improvements in this one relating to the table.transform() feature , which adds support for complex alter table operations by creating a fresh table, copying across the data and then dropping and replacing the old one. transform() now preserves a much larger array of edge-case schema definitions, including check constraints, unique constraints and even comments…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Release: llm-gemini 0.33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release. This version of the plugin adds support for today's Gemini 3.7 Flash release, plus gemini-3.6-flash , gemini-3.5-flash-lite and two embedding models gemini-embedding-2 and gemini-embedding-001 . The plugin is also upgraded for compatibility with LLM 0.32, which means you can now see reasoning traces and you can also…
Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
The hacking of HuggingFace by an internal OpenAI model, and more importantly the internal events that led to that and the fallout from it, remain the thing that matters.
Summary published by Don't Worry About the Vase · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
We interviewed some of the experts behind Gemini Omni to hear what excites them most about the model.
Summary published by Google DeepMind · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Managed Deep Agents gives developers a managed way to build, run, and deploy Deep Agents with built-in runtime, streaming, sandboxes, evals, memory, and auth.
Summary published by LangChain Blog · 13 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗
Learn what AI agents are, how they work in an LLM loop, and where workflows fit so you can build reliable, production-ready autonomous systems.
Summary published by LangChain Blog · 12 Aug 2026 · Read the original ↗