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Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

antirez.com

41–50 of 383 posts

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#41
post #36

> Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway Here we go again. Statements with the single source in the head of the speaker. And it’s also not true. The llms still produce bad/irrelevant code at such rate that you can spend more time prompting than doing things yourself. I’m tired of this overestimation of llms.

But you have just repeated what you are complaining about.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#43
I have programmed 30K+ hours. Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so. The secret sauce is that you'd know exactly what to do without them.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#44
post #22

> And I've vibe coded entire ephemeral apps just to find a single bug because why not - code is suddenly free, ephemeral, malleable, discardable after single use. Vibe coding will terraform software and alter job descriptions. I'm not super up-to-date on all that's happening in AI-land, but in this quote I can find something that most techno-enthusiast seem to have decided to ignore: no, code is not free. There are i…

You know what uses roughly 80 times more water in the US alone than water used by AI data centers world wide? Corn.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#45
> There are certain tasks, like improving a given program for speed, for instance, where in theory the model can continue to make progress with a very clear reward signal for a very long time.

Super skeptical of this claim. Yes, if I have some toy poorly optimized python example or maybe a sorting algorithm in ASM, but this won’t work in any non-trivial case. My intuition is that the LLM will spin its wheels at a local minimum the performance of which is overdetermined by millions of black-box optimizations in the interpreter or compiler signal from which is not fed back to the LLM.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#46
post #7

> The fundamental challenge in AI for the next 20 years is avoiding extinction. That's a weird thing to end on. Surely it's worth more than one sentence if you're serious about it? As it stands, it feels a bit like the fearmongering Big Tech CEOs use to drive up the AI stocks. If AI is really that powerful and I should care about it, I'd rather hear about it without the scare tactics.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici... has much better arguments than the LessWrong sources in other comments, and they weren't written by Big Tech CEOs.

Also "my product will kill you and everyone you care about" is not as great a marketing strategy as you seem to imply, and Big Tech CEOs are not talking about risks anymore. They currently say things like "we'll all be so rich that we won't need to work and we will have to find meaning without jobs"

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#47

>* For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. In 2025 finally almost everybody stopped saying so. Man, Antirez and I walk in very different circles! I s…

LLMs certainly struggle with tasks that require knowledge that is not provided to them (at significant enough volume/variance to retain it). But this is to be expected of any intelligent agent, it is certainly true of humans. It is not a good argument to support the claim that they are Chinese Rooms (unthinking imitators). Indeed, the whole point of the Chinese Room thought experiment was to consider if that distinction even mattered.

When it comes to of being able to do novel tasks on known knowledge, they seem to be quite good. One also needs to consider that problem-solving patterns are also a kind of (meta-)knowledge that needs to be taught, either through imitation/memorisation (Supervised Learning) or through practice (Reinforcement Learning). They can be logically derived from other techniques to an extent, just like new knowledge can be derived from known knowledge in general, and again LLMs seem to be pretty decent at this, but only to a point. Regardless, all of this is definitely true of humans too.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#48
post #36

> Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway Here we go again. Statements with the single source in the head of the speaker. And it’s also not true. The llms still produce bad/irrelevant code at such rate that you can spend more time prompting than doing things yourself. I’m tired of this overestimation of llms.

My person experience: if I can find a solution on stackoverflow etc. the LLM will produce working and fundamentally correct code. If I can‘t find a already fullfilled solution on these sites, the LLM is hallucinating like crazy (newer existing functions/modules/plugins, protocol features which aren’t specified and even github-repos which never existed). So, as stated my many people online before: for low-hanging fruits LLM are totally viable solution.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#49
post #28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he’s not a “random internet person”, he created Redis. Despite that, I don’t know how authoritative of a figure he is with respect to AI research. He’s definitely a prolific programmer though.

That still qualifies as a random internet person, wrt the topic. And I think the emphasis is on no sources and I beliefs and I thinks, in any case :)

[deleted]

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#50
post #13
post #12

This is a bunch of "I believe" and "I think" with no sources by a random internet person.

> by a random internet person. The creator of Redis.

Sure but quite a few claims in the article are about AI research. He does not have any qualifications there. If the focus was more on usefulness, that would be a different discussion and then his experience does add weight.
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