Simon Willison

Highlight

Simon flags OpenAI’s deep dive into Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) and internal agentic workflows as a key milestone, highlighting a massive late-July surge in AI compute spend per researcher that likely signals the early rollout of GPT-6 Astra. This offers a critical look at how the frontier lab is using its own AI tools to accelerate its engineering pace.

Posts

Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI · Source OpenAI released new insights detailing how their research teams are leveraging coding agents in their day-to-day work, declaring 2026 as the year agentic engineering truly matured. Simon notes their heavy emphasis on Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), which he suspects is their new play for AGI, alongside a fresh essay titled “An Alien Mind” by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki. Simon is particularly intrigued by a chart showing a dramatic spike in AI spend per researcher in late July, theorizing that this represents the moment internal teams got their hands on GPT-6 Astra.

The purpose of DNS is to spread scams · Source Simon reacts to daunting cybercrime data shared by Terence Eden via a recent Interisle report on global domain abuse. The statistics reveal that out of 85 million generic top-level domains (gTLDs) registered in 2025, a staggering 8.5 million were blocklisted within months—meaning a 10% to 20% abuse rate floor where roughly one in five new domains is a scam. Simon admits he had no idea the crisis was this severe, despite ICANN apparently debating the issue for years.

Quoting Zach Kehs · Source Simon highlights a sharp observation by Zach Kehs regarding the unique nature of technical debt and code degradation. Kehs contrasts software with physical architecture, noting that while a physical building will eventually collapse if you keep adding rooms and floors, software faces no physical ceiling—meaning the code can always get worse, accumulate endless layers of indirection, and suffer continuous hits to performance without ever hitting a hard physical limit.

Project Pulse

Even across these brief daily updates, there is a clear thematic focus on system limits and automation. Simon is tracking both the structural vulnerabilities of our digital foundations—such as massive DNS scam networks and unbounded code complexity—and the rapid shift toward models and coding agents that programmatically modify those same systems.

📈 Want to look at some data? If you have a CSV or dataset with domain abuse figures or software metrics, we can write a python script to clean it up and build a clear matplotlib chart to visualize the trends.