What Simon Willison thinks about LLMs
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Simon Willison did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Only Simon Willison on LLMs. See everyone on LLMs
12 dated positions, 2024 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Simon Willison has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsThese two new models, when paired with their respective coding agent harnesses, improved from “often make mistakes” to “reliable enough to use on a day-to-day basis”.
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Our readingFierce competition means the best AI model in the world gets knocked off the top spot quickly.
Their wordsWhen you release the best model in the world, it’s going get knocked off that pedestal pretty quickly. The competition is so fierce that you won’t get a long time at the top
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsOur industry is destabilized in a way nobody’s experienced since the advent of the personal computer.
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Their wordsEverything we do with frontier models today, in a few years we’ll be doing instantaneously and for free.
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsThis makes me suspect that “max” is effectively useless—if it over-thinks to breaking point on a stupid SVG prompt I don’t trust it not to do the same for more interesting work.
↗Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price warsimonwillison.net
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsBeing a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsThe rule to never use a turn of phrase suggested by an LLM feels good to me. The text has that weird smell to it, and it's also a good principle to help stay disciplined.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsI think any LLM system that uses compaction needs to both preserve the pre-compacted text and make that text available via agent tool calls, to protect against this kind of problem.
↗Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Worksimonwillison.net
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsJust knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first.
↗On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problemsimonwillison.net
- 6 months earlier
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Their wordsThe problem with language models is they're incredibly gullible by design. Like, language models do exactly what you tell them to do, and they will believe almost anything that you say to them.
↗Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summityoutube.com 9th of 18 in this recording
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Their wordsProblem is, you can solve SQL injection by parameterizing your queries. You can't do that with LLMs.
↗Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summityoutube.com 10th of 18 in this recording
- 15 months earlier
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Their wordsThere’s still plenty to worry about with respect to the environmental impact of the great AI datacenter buildout, but a lot of the concerns over the energy cost of individual prompts are no longer credible.