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hansmayer parent
While it's very honest of you to disclose in full your various affiliations to the LLM vendors, and it does look like you're not being paid by them - the reason they are inviting you for the early previews and all that is precisely because they either expect or assume you won't go to critical on them. And that shows in your writing to be honest. I'd assume the same in their place. So yeah, not paid obviously, but it seems indirectly incentivised to not be as critical as one could be...
simonw
Just in the past two weeks:

I wrote about how good skills are... but pointed out the flaws in MCP at the same time. Anthropic have invested way more in MCP.

I called out Claude Haiku 4.5 as being more expensive than previous Haiku models when the thing I was hoping for was something that was price competitive with GPT-5 Mini/Nano and Gemini Flash Lite.

NVIDIA sent me a review unit of their Spark and I wrote about how hard it was to get CUDA and Arm working together.

OpenAI invited me to DevDay and I published a GPT-5 Pro pelican that took 6 minutes and cost $1.10 cents, plus made fun of their terrible track record for announcing and then failing to ship revenue sharing on a livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/M6paPiur4yQ?si=XXKkIKY2J71QCJKW...

The reason I get invited to stuff is that I'm a trusted independent voice in the space. The labs appear smart enough not to expect me to throw away my credibility for a free event ticket or early preview access to their launches.

More importantly: I don't value early access or event invitations very highly. If a lab stopped inviting me to stuff it really wouldn't affect me much at all. Might even help give me some space to focus on other things!

hansmayer OP
Don't know what to tell you. I read through your blog quite often and it just...does not come across as fully unbiased. While I am sure you are putting in a lot of effort and genuinely want to be impartial, it just does not come across as such. Now, you are making another assumption here. You may think you are getting early access because you are a trusted independent voice. But think about the alternative possibility: Would it not be a very simple logic to conclude you are getting early access because it is a way to affect your writing subtly (you may not be even aware) and trigger some un-concious self-censoring? From the reader's perspective, this is kind of like that "embedded reporting" in war theaters since early 2000s that was applied for propaganda purposes in the past.
simonw
What would "unbiased" even mean for a blog like mine?

I don't particularly try to be unbiased because I don't think that's an achievable goal. What I aim for instead is honesty and truthfulness. I try very hard not to put false information out into the world, and when I do that I work hard to retract it - here's a recent example: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/gemini-25-computer-use-...

I'm also take care to disclose things that could potentially influence my coverage, even if I don't personally think they influenced what I wrote.

What matters most to me is that I have an audience who finds me credible and trusts me not to mislead them, either accidentally or on purpose.

That's why I'm defensive against accusations of being a paid shill, which crop up on almost a weekly basis at this point.

hansmayer OP
unbiased as in: not immediately claiming a new feature would be big, mere 24h after it was released to the general public?
simonw
How is that "bias", especially if it's a thing I believe to be true?

Are we going to have a break out the dictionaries again?

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