Notices by Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)

Extraordinary article on the energy usage of generative AI from BloombergNEF founder Michael Liebreich - absolutely worth spending some time with this: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/

I wrote up some of my own notes on the article here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/12/generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/

@quinn I've been planning a piece on why I don't think software engineers should be afraid of losing their jobs to LLMs - I've touched on it a little in podcasts but I've not written it up yet https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/software-misadventures/#are-we-all-going-to-lose-your-jobs-

@quinn totally - and I'm sympathetic to that, this stuff really is weird and frightening and a lot of the negative implications and harmful applications are very real

I confess to finding it it a little frustrating when I'm accused of being an "LLM shill" or "breathlessly proselytizing" while my ai+ethics tag has 121 posts and counting https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai+ethics/

@profdiggity @wordshaper @cwebber so
Let's pass some regulations such that it's not legal to do that stuff and there are penalties with teeth for companies caught doing it

(Throw in some whistleblower rewards too, incentivize reporting!)

@cwebber @zacchiro I completely agree!

I want people to understand things like how companies use their email and phone number as a unique ID to correlate their activity across multiple apps

I push back on the microphone thing so hard because it distracts people from understanding the real issues

@cwebber @zacchiro I also think it's a really harmful conspiracy theory, because it teaches people that everything is lost already, and it makes the believers accept that they'll tolerate a dystopian surveillance state if it lets them keep using their phones

That's so unhealthy for society

@cwebber @profdiggity it's technically feasible to run on-device transcription models today, in 2025

These conspiracy theories have been commonplace since 2017, if not earlier

The issue of whether or not malicious attackers can use zero-day vulnerabilities to spy through a microphone should be discussed separately from whether ad tech companies are using those tricks for targeting IMO

I'm fully aware that this is a total waste of my time, but given today's news about an Apple settlement relating to Siri audio recordings I wrote this blog post about why I still don't think that companies are spying on us through our phone's microphones: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/2/they-spy-on-you-but-not-like-that/

@iveyline I really hope not. I like LLMs that augment human abilities - that give us new tools. That's one of the reasons I'm unexcited about the idea of "AGI" - that sounds like a human-replacement play to me, which doesn't interest me at all.

Here's my end-of-year review of things we learned about LLMs in 2024 - we learned a LOT of things https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/

Table of contents:

Searching Google for "encanto 2" right now provides an entirely made-up response derived from an imagined description of the film on a fan fiction wiki
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/29/encanto-2/

Turns out we weren't done for major LLM releases in 2024 after all... Alibaba's Qwen just released QvQ, a "visual reasoning model" - the same chain-of-thought trick as OpenAI's o1 but applied strictly to running a prompt against an image

I've been trying it out and it's a lot of fun to poke around with: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/24/qvq/

Here's what it said when I asked it to count those pelicans

Here are all of experiments with full transcripts https://gist.github.com/simonw/6c296f4b9323736dc77978447b6368fc

I got QvQ running on my (M2 64GB) laptop!

uv run --with 'numpy<2.0' --with mlx-vlm python \
-m mlx_vlm.generate \
--model mlx-community/QVQ-72B-Preview-4bit \
--max-tokens 10000 \
--temp 0.0 \
--prompt "describe this" \
--image pelicans-on-bicycles-veo2.jpg

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/24/qvq/#with-mlx-vlm

The other major Chinese AI lab, DeepSeek, just dropped their own last-minute entry into the 2024 model race: DeepSeek v3 is a HUGE model (685B parameters) which showed up, mostly undocumented, on Hugging Face this morning. My notes so far: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/25/deepseek-v3/

The DeepSeek v3 paper came out this morning, added a few notes about that here https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/26/deepseek-v3/

Rewatching Severance in preparation for season 2 starting on January the 19th - it rewatches *really well*. I'm running a rewatch series on MetaFilter FanFare here, with a new episode every three days - just posted S1E2 https://fanfare.metafilter.com/show/severance

@evan I use GitHub copilot but I get a ton of work done directly in Claude (with Artifacts) and ChatGPT (with Code Interpeter) pasting code back and forth