Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison
https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison">Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison
On Monday Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal invited me to join their podcast to talk about the wild week we've had - with Kimi K3 showing open weight models can stand toe-to-toe with proprietary frontier ones, https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/">accidental cybersecurity attacks, and public letters about https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/">Open Weights and American AI Leadership signed by almost every big name in AI (with one https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models">notable exception).
It was a great conversation, even though it's already out-of-date! https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-flash">DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 and https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/30/three-real-world-incidents/">Anthropic's own embarrassing cyber incident would absolutely have made the cut if we had recorded just a few days later.
We also talk about https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude">Golden Gate Claude, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians">Zizians, https://abc7news.com/post/83-year-old-alameda-woman-attacked-wild-turkeys-city-warns-residents-take-precautions-during-mating-season/19190785/">Alameda wild turkey attacks, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_program">Soviet Marburg virus research, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis">Lead-crime hypothesis, and a bunch of other worthy digressions.
Finally, we revisited some of https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-2026/">our predictions from January, and we https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/25/encyclical-on-ai/#another-2026-prediction-down">added a new Pope prediction:
Prediction by the end of this year: the Pope says something about open models.
Tags: https://simonwillison.net/tags/predictions">predictions, https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai, https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai, https://simonwillison.net/tags/local-llms">local-llms, https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms, https://simonwillison.net/tags/oxide">oxide, https://simonwillison.net/tags/bryan-cantrill">bryan-cantrill, https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-in-china">ai-in-china, https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-security-research">ai-security-research