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 RatliffOxF: Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres FreundOxF: Predictions 2025OxF: Predictions 2026!!OxF: Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip BallOxF: 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 gardenABC7: Gerald the turkey and the Morcom Rose GardenAPD cautions residents after aggressive wild turkey attacks elderly AlamedanHawking radiationDHH's racist complaintsGrok's "MechaHitler" antisemitic spreeSimon on Grok aka "MechaHitler"Hugging Face security incident, July 2026OpenAI on the Hugging Face model evaluation security incidentGreg Brockman's political donations and the Leading the Future super PACOpenAI co-founder and wife donate $5.5M to save the home of bald eagles Jackie and ShadowFirecracker microVMMeltdown (security vulnerability)Kernel page-table isolationJensen Huang on XElectronic design automationGolden Gate ClaudeTethicsHalloween documentsZiziansBiohazard (book)CRISPROliver Sacks: criticism and falsificationsHow Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everythingAmerican Poison by Daniel StoneLead–crime hypothesisPope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas encyclicalRerum 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!