{"slug": "oxide-and-friends-the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison", "title": "Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison", "summary": "In a recent episode of the Oxide and Friends podcast, Simon Willison discussed the open weight revolution, touching on topics such as DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, Anthropic's cyber incident, and Golden Gate Claude. Willison also revisited predictions from January and added a new one: by the end of 2026, the Pope will say something about open models.", "body_md": "[Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison](https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison)\n\nIt was a great conversation, even though it's already out-of-date! [DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/deepseek-v4-flash) and [Anthropic's own embarrassing cyber incident](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/30/three-real-world-incidents/) would absolutely have made the cut if we had recorded just a few days later.\n\nWe also talk about [Golden Gate Claude](https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude), the [Zizians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians), [Alameda wild turkey attacks](https://abc7news.com/post/83-year-old-alameda-woman-attacked-wild-turkeys-city-warns-residents-take-precautions-during-mating-season/19190785/), [Soviet Marburg virus research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_program), the [Lead-crime hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis), and a bunch of other worthy digressions.\n\nFinally, we revisited some of [our predictions from January](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/llm-predictions-for-2026/), and we [added a new Pope prediction](https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/25/encyclical-on-ai/#another-2026-prediction-down):\n\nPrediction by the end of this year: the Pope says something about open models.\n\nTags: [predictions](https://simonwillison.net/tags/predictions), [ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), [generative-ai](https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), [local-llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/local-llms), [llms](https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), [oxide](https://simonwillison.net/tags/oxide), [bryan-cantrill](https://simonwillison.net/tags/bryan-cantrill), [ai-in-china](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-in-china), [ai-security-research](https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-security-research)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oxide-and-friends-the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison", "canonical_source": "https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/oxide-and-friends/#atom-everything", "published_at": "2026-07-31 21:33:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-31 21:59:15.728398+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "large-language-models", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Simon Willison", "Oxide and Friends", "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731", "Anthropic", "Golden Gate Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oxide-and-friends-the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oxide-and-friends-the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oxide-and-friends-the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oxide-and-friends-the-open-weight-revolution-with-simon-willison.jsonld"}}