Simon Willison AI profile

Guides, skills, and tools from Simon Willison

Model analysis

Simon Willison on GPT-6 Astra

Intermediate to advanced

You want a concise independent read of GPT-6 Astra's launch claims, benchmark caveats, long-context results, pricing, and early comparison with Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

Talk

Simon Willison: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

Beginner to advanced

You want a grounded tour of current LLM tooling, model tradeoffs, and the practical ecosystem.

Blog

Simon Willison on LLMs

Beginner to advanced

Use this when you want Simon Willison's material for llm tools and related AI skills.

Learner questions

Who should learn from Simon Willison?

Developers, technical generalists should start here when they need llm tools, prompting, ai safety, local models, and model selection. The strongest fit is a learner who wants material in these formats: blog, open source tools.

What should I do first?

Read the recent model-roundup posts, then try the llm command-line tool with two or three different providers. After that, open one related resource below and write down the exact workflow, concept, or implementation pattern you want to apply.

What problem does this help with?

Consistently useful notes, demos, model comparisons, and warnings about practical LLM use without product marketing gloss. Use this profile when you are comparing educators by topic, level, format, and practical usefulness rather than browsing random AI content.

How do I compare this with other educators?

Compare the skill coverage, the starting recommendation, the educator's own resources, and any videos when available. If you need llm tools, search the directory for that skill and shortlist three profiles before committing to a course, book, or playlist.

More related resources

Resource	Kind	Level	Use when
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers DeepLearning.AI	Short course	Beginner	You want a short, structured intro to prompting for software tasks.
Learn Prompting Sander Schulhoff	Guide	Beginner to intermediate	You need a broad prompt engineering reference.
Prompt Engineering Guide DAIR.AI	Guide	Beginner to advanced	You want examples of prompting techniques and patterns.
The AI Engineer Roadmap Matt Pocock	Free tutorial	Beginner to intermediate	You want a guided path through core AI concepts, model selection, the AI engineering mindset, evals, and techniques for improving LLM-powered apps.
Google's AI Principles Google	Responsible AI principles	Beginner	Use this as Google's primary statement of the principles it applies to AI development and deployment, alongside the playbook's recommendation to build a framework for trust.
Develop AI-Powered Prototypes in Google AI Studio Google Cloud	Skill badge course	Beginner	Use this 45-minute hands-on course to practice prompting, multimodal image and video analysis, and rapid application prototyping in Google AI Studio.
Claude Sonnet 5.5 explained Anthropic	Model migration explainer	Intermediate to advanced	Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, 2026. Use this guide to understand the efficiency claims, breaking API changes, and a safe migration test from Sonnet 5.
Ember-1 explained Fireworks AI	Reasoning-efficient coding model explainer	Intermediate to advanced	Fireworks released Ember-1 on September 23, 2026 as a Kimi K3-based model trained to use fewer reasoning tokens. Use this explainer to evaluate the quality, cost, latency, and context-growth claims on your own agent workload.
Grok 4.7 explained SpaceXAI	Frontier coding model launch explainer	Intermediate to advanced	SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7 on September 21, 2026 for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work. Use this guide to compare its task reliability and total cost with your current model.
Union Alpha revealed as Pareto 26.9 Unbiased	Multi-model routing launch explainer	Intermediate to advanced	Union Alpha was revealed as Unbiased's Pareto 26.9 on September 17, 2026: a hosted system that routes work across several models and returns one checked answer.
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash explained Qwen	Omnimodal model launch explainer	Intermediate	Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash launched September 18, 2026 for long audio and video analysis, text answers, web search, and tool-calling workflows.
GPT-Live-1 in the API OpenAI	Voice agent model launch	Intermediate	You want OpenAI's September 10, 2026 launch of GPT-Live-1 in the API for full-duplex voice agents, including its $0.05-per-minute front-end pricing and guidance on pairing it with a backend model and agent harness.

Simon Willison

Videos from Simon Willison

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

Open Challenges for AI Engineering

Open Questions for AI Engineering

AI tools for software engineers without the hype

Using LLMs for Python Development

Skills

Guides, skills, and tools from Simon Willison

Simon Willison on GPT-6 Astra

Simon Willison: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

Simon Willison on LLMs

Learner questions

Who should learn from Simon Willison?

What should I do first?

What problem does this help with?

How do I compare this with other educators?

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