The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison

Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a wild couple of weeks in AI. First, we have a high-profile, AI-induced, AI-diagnosed security incident. Next we have the rise of frontier-class open-weights models. Who's for or against open weights? Do they make for a more or less secure future? Exciting times!

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Simon Willison.

Previously, on Oxide and Friends:

• OxF: Shell Game with Evan Ratliff
• OxF: Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
• OxF: Predictions 2025
• OxF: Predictions 2026!!
• OxF: Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
• OxF: OpenAI's Boardroom Brawl

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• Gerald the turkey terrorizes Oakland's rose garden
• ABC7: Gerald the turkey and the Morcom Rose Garden
• APD cautions residents after aggressive wild turkey attacks elderly Alamedan
• Hawking radiation
• DHH's racist complaints
• Grok's "MechaHitler" antisemitic spree
• Simon on Grok aka "MechaHitler"
• Hugging Face security incident, July 2026
• OpenAI on the Hugging Face model evaluation security incident
• Greg Brockman's political donations and the Leading the Future super PAC
• OpenAI co-founder and wife donate $5.5M to save the home of bald eagles Jackie and Shadow
• Firecracker microVM
• Meltdown (security vulnerability)
• Kernel page-table isolation
• Jensen Huang on X
• Electronic design automation
• Golden Gate Claude
• Tethics
• Halloween documents
• Zizians
• Biohazard (book)
• CRISPR
• Oliver Sacks: criticism and falsifications
• How Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything
• American Poison by Daniel Stone
• Lead–crime hypothesis
• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas encyclical
• Rerum novarum

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!