Simon Willison · 2026-05-19 · notable
Simon Willison — The Last Six Months in LLMs, in Five Minutes
Simon Willison's PyCon US 2026 lightning talk recaps six months of LLM progress: frontier models trading the top spot, coding agents going from often-work to mostly-work, and open-weight models now running well on laptops.
A five-minute tour of what changed in large language models between late 2025 and May 2026.
What is it?
A written version of Simon Willison's lightning talk at PyCon US 2026. Willison is the creator of Datasette and the LLM CLI and writes one of the most-followed running commentaries on LLM developments.
How does it work?
The post walks through three themes: multiple frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) alternating as the best model, coding agents maturing from unreliable to daily-driver tools via reinforcement learning, and open-weight models like Gemma 4, GLM-5.1, and Qwen becoming strong enough to run on consumer laptops. It uses his recurring 'pelican riding a bicycle' SVG benchmark to compare models.
Why does it matter?
It is a fast, opinionated catch-up for anyone who tuned out of AI news for six months, from a source known for verifying claims and avoiding hype.
Who is it for?
developers catching up on AI