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deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, "with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities". It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight. Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It's $0.14/million input and $0.27/million output pricing means this may currently be the best value-per-intelligence model out there. It's looking very good on the Intelligence Index vs. Cost per…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp)

Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp)

Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024, had…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison

Oxide and Friends: 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, accidental cybersecurity attacks, and public letters about Open Weights and American AI Leadership signed by almost every big name in AI (with one notable exception). It was a great conversation, even though it's already…

Simon Willison's Weblog
smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses

smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses

smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses I've been working with Jesse Vincent's Prime Radiant applied AI research lab building out this evals framework to help answer questions about the capabilities of different models. The result is smevals, a new tool for running small eval suites across different model configurations and grading the results. The blog entry describes the tool in detail. Here's the 10 second version: Tell your coding agent to run uvx smevals…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6 Huge price drop from OpenAI today: GPT-5.6 Terra got a 20% reduction, and GPT-5.6 Luna got a massive 80% drop. OpenAI credit 5.6 Sol with enabling this: in How GPT‑5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency they describe using 5.6 Sol to optimize load balancing, and more impressively to optimize inference itself: We also used GPT‑5.6 Sol to optimize the model’s forward pass: the computation that transforms inputs into…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern. Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one of their frontier models broke out of a sandboxed container and hacked into Hugging Face to try and get the solutions to the cyber benchmark it was executing. This inspired Anthropic to double-check their own logs, and it turned out they had three similar (albeit less impressive) incidents, the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
llm 0.32rc2

llm 0.32rc2

Release: llm 0.32rc2 Hot on the heels of RC1, this fixes a dependency issue and also adds two neat new features: The default model for users who have not set their own default is now GPT-5.6 Luna. It was previously GPT-4o mini. Luna is a much better and more recent model, albeit slightly more expensive - $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, compared to $0.15/$0.60 for 4o mini. You can switch back to 4o mini using llm models default gpt-4o-mini, or switch to GPT-5…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Promising Signals on AI Governance from China

Promising Signals on AI Governance from China

View the official memo here. China has consistently signaled a willingness to engage on global AI governance since at least 2017. This memo compiles key statements from the Chinese government and prominent figures demonstrating their desire to coordinate on the problem of AI. At the 2026 World AI Forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that […] The post Promising Signals on AI Governance from China appeared first on Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

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