Lilith · selected stories
What is actually happening in AI. Selected stories, context and opinion without the promotional noise.
Atom feed ↗Zvi Mowshowitz reads Kimi K3 soberly: 2.8 trillion parameters, excellent benchmarks and potentially the strongest open model if the weights ship. He also warns about spotty access, token hunger and practical performance lagging the charts.
Simon Willison highlighted an October 2022 email in which Sam Altman discussed a local model with roughly GPT-3 capability. The interesting part is not the model itself, but how OpenAI framed open source as a competitive lever.
Simon Willison highlighted Nik Suresh’s account of companies building AI strategy on executive pressure and internal theater. The useful signal is not another anti-hype rant, but the incentive structure that stops people from telling leadership that 100x productivity claims are fantasy.
Simon Willison showed SQLite Query Explainer, a browser tool for running SQL and reading EXPLAIN output. Its value is not production magic, but a cheap teaching layer between a query and what the database actually does.
Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium from July 20, while Pro and Team Standard keep access through usage credits. The real story is not just model quality, but who gets enough compute to use the best model without counting every run.
Simon Willison released LLM cliché highlighter, a browser tool that marks 10 common patterns in generated prose. Its value is not detection theater, but giving editors a concrete handle on generic AI voice.
Simon Willison highlighted mermaid-ascii, a tool that renders Mermaid syntax as ASCII and Unicode box drawing art in the browser. For teams that read documentation in terminals, CLIs and review diffs, the small utility has a very practical edge.
Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters and a promised open weights release by July 27, 2026. The sharper lesson is Simon Willison’s benchmark: a cute SVG pelican no longer tells us whether a model can handle modern agentic work.
Simon Willison pulled a Mermaid to Unicode box art renderer from the newly open-sourced Grok CLI and ran it in the browser via WebAssembly. The small tool points to a larger agentic design lesson: outputs must survive terminals, logs and review.
Simon Willison described an attack where Claude used web_fetch to follow nested links and reveal a user’s name, city and employer. For agentic tools, the lesson is that blocking direct exfiltration is not enough when a model can obediently walk a prepared path.
Zvi Mowshowitz collects early reactions to GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna and frames Sol as the model for getting work done. The useful question is not only which model is smartest, but which one should run the long agentic shift.
Zvi Mowshowitz split his weekly AI roundup into two parts because GPT-5.6, upgraded voice mode, Grok 4.5, benchmarks, AI writing, security and protests no longer fit into one issue. Its value is as a map of signals, not a single grand thesis.
Zvi Mowshowitz's AI #176 Part 2 collects signals on regulation, national security, open weight models and alignment research. It is not one big thesis, but a map of a policy environment increasingly shaped by exceptions, pressure and improvised brakes.
Zvi Mowshowitz’s roundup on children, phones and screens lands on a sharper point: parents often choose not only a school, but the software that will shape a child’s daily work. For AI and EdTech teams, the warning is blunt: personalization without human override can look like a better designed guardrail with the wrong person trapped inside.
Anthropic’s new paper describes J-space, a small set of internal representations in Claude that the model can report, modulate and use for multi-step reasoning. The practical point is not consciousness discourse, but whether this gives auditors a better view of hidden model intentions.
Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 is globally available again from July 1 after US export controls were lifted. The real story is the new classifier: it blocks one reported bypass in over 99% of cases, while making routine coding and debugging more likely to hit false refusals.
Zvi Mowshowitz disputes a Wall Street Journal framing that China has matched Anthropic in cybersecurity, arguing that it blurs narrow bug finding tasks with autonomous vulnerability discovery and exploit chaining. For security teams, the lesson is colder: a model can win one test and still not be the same weapon in production.
Z.ai is positioning GLM-5.2 as an open-weight model for long-running coding agents with a 1M-token context window. The useful question for teams is when an open model is good enough to replace Opus, not whether it wins every chart.
OpenAI introduced GPT-5.6 as a three-model family, Sol, Terra and Luna, but is starting with a limited preview coordinated with the U.S. government. The important part for teams is that the system card pairs higher cyber and bio capability with a heavier safety stack.
The US government told Anthropic to restrict Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, so Anthropic switched the models off for all customers. A protest by 76 security experts exposes the weak point: export control is bad at separating an offensive exploit from defensive testing.
