Simon Willison Delivers PyCon 2026 Lightning Talk: 'The Last Six Months in LLMs in Five Minutes'

simonwillison.net·high signal

Published today, Willison's annotated slides identify a November 2025 inflection point where the 'best' model changed hands five times across three providers (Claude Sonnet 4.5 → GPT-5.1 → Gemini 3 → GPT-5.1 Codex Max → Claude Opus 4.5). Two key shifts: coding agents hit production-readiness via reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, and open-weight models now 'wildly outperform expectations' — Qwen3.6-35B runs in 20.9GB on a laptop. Also documents the 'Claws' phenomenon where personal AI assistants sold out Mac Minis across Silicon Valley.