#simon-willison

OpenAI Has Been on the Wrong Side of History #

Reddit comment from u/samaltman

via Simon Willison

Sam Altman, in response to a request to release model weights:

yes, we are discussing. i personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy; not everyone at openai shares this view, and it’s also not our current highest priority.

I saw this comment on Slashdot yesterday, but didn’t realize that it came from Altman’s personal Reddit account. I previously assumed that Altman said this in a conversation with some politician, where absolutely nothing could be taken literally without considering OpenAI’s motives.

I still don’t think that this Reddit comment can be really considered as OpenAI going back to open source, especially since Altman has so much leverage in terms of the company’s plans and could have previously attempted to pivot to a more open company. This discrepancy is especially obvious even when comparing OpenAI to Anthropic, who doesn’t publish open model weights but at least attempts to make parts of their technology more accessible for usage without a $200/month subscription.

This comment is obviously catered towards the audience who thinks that OpenAI is going to implode because of DeepSeek, but there’s not really any advantage for OpenAI to open source their stack since the company is well established compared to the Chinese AI lab. I would guess that the main reasoning for this comment is just to give investors something to work with when considering OpenAI’s status compared to other AI companies (of course, primarily DeepSeek), so I wouldn’t derive any real meaning out of it.

Tiny Wasm Compiler #

A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet

via Simon Willison

This was a really cool walkthrough of an obfuscated program through incrementally deobfuscating it. I especially liked the heavy use of coercion in the obfuscated code, since that heavily leans on JavaScript’s somewhat janky typecasting that always leads to interesting results. I’ve previously written a compiler using LLVM, and the similar “low-level but not too low-level” aspect of the Wasm byte array makes it seem like a fun spec to create and compile a language into.