2026 in LLMs (so far)

Simon Willison delivered the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday. His talk, titled “2026 in LLMs (so far),” offered a chronological account of developments in large language models over the past year.

Willison has published the video of the keynote on YouTube, accompanied by annotated slides and notes on his website. The talk aims to connect what he describes as the key trends observed across the year into a single narrative arc, tracing how the field has moved from one development to the next.

The published material does not detail the specific content of the trends discussed, beyond confirming that the talk covers the period’s major developments in the large language model space. The full substance of Willison’s chronological exploration, including which specific models, releases, or shifts he highlights, is presented in the video and the accompanying slide notes rather than summarized in the announcement itself.

Willison is a software developer and writer who documents developments in artificial intelligence and web technology on his personal site. The San Jose event, part of the broader WeAreDevelopers World Congress series held in North America, drew developers for its closing session, at which Willison’s keynote served as the capstone presentation of the conference program.