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 Ratliff
OxF: Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund
OxF: Predictions 2025
OxF: Predictions 2026!!
OxF: Bookclub: How Life Works by Philip Ball
OxF: 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 garden
ABC7: Gerald the turkey and the Morcom Rose Garden
APD cautions residents after aggressive wild turkey attacks elderly Alamedan
Hawking radiation
DHH's racist complaints
Grok's "MechaHitler" antisemitic spree
Simon on Grok aka "MechaHitler"
Hugging Face security incident, July 2026
OpenAI on the Hugging Face model evaluation security incident
Greg Brockman's political donations and the Leading the Future super PAC
OpenAI co-founder and wife donate $5.5M to save the home of bald eagles Jackie and Shadow
Firecracker microVM
Meltdown (security vulnerability)
Kernel page-table isolation
Jensen Huang on X
Electronic design automation
Golden Gate Claude
Tethics
Halloween documents
Zizians
Biohazard (book)
CRISPR
Oliver Sacks: criticism and falsifications
How Alice Hamilton waged a one-woman campaign to get the lead out of everything
American Poison by Daniel Stone
Lead–crime hypothesis
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas encyclical
Rerum 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!