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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#171

Post by lostlogin »

mgfist wrote: post #164
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto bros in hindsight were so much less dangerous than AI bros. At least they weren't trying to construct data centers in rural America or prop up artificial stocks like $NVDA.

It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains.

I’ve heard about the risk of AI leading to job losses and wealth concentration.

I haven’t heard about new businesses, job creation and growth in former industrial towns. What have I missed?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#172

Post by CamperBob2 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #167
handoflixue wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. Funny, I've used them to create my own personalized text editor, perfectly tailored to what I actually want. I'm pretty sure that didn't exist before. It's wild to me how many people who talk about LLM apparently haven't learned how to use them for even very basic tasks like this! No wonder you think they're not that powerful, if you don't even know ba…

> You really owe it to yourself to try them out. I've worked at multiple AI startups in lead AI Engineering roles, both working on deploying user facing LLM products and working on the research end of LLMs. I've done collaborative projects and demos with a pretty wide range of big names in this space (but don't want to doxx myself too aggressively), have had my LLM work cited on HN multiple times, have LLM based gith…

That's all very impressive, to be sure. But are you sure you're getting the point? As of 2025, LLMs are now very good at writing new code, creating new imagery, and writing original text. They continue to improve at a remarkable rate. They are helping their users create things that didn't exist before. Additionally, they are now very good at searching and utilizing web resources that didn't exist at training time.

So it is absurdly incorrect to say "they can only reproduce the past." Only someone who hasn't been paying attention (as you put it) would say such a thing.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#174

Post by jakeydus »

mgfist wrote: post #164
OGEnthusiast wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto bros in hindsight were so much less dangerous than AI bros. At least they weren't trying to construct data centers in rural America or prop up artificial stocks like $NVDA.

It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains.

How many people are employed at the average data center? A few dozen? Versus a steel mill, that’s nothing. A chicken plant in Nebraska closed down this last month. 3200 people lost their jobs. You think Meta will fill it with GPUs and the whole town will have jobs again?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#175

Post by handoflixue »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #167
handoflixue wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. Funny, I've used them to create my own personalized text editor, perfectly tailored to what I actually want. I'm pretty sure that didn't exist before. It's wild to me how many people who talk about LLM apparently haven't learned how to use them for even very basic tasks like this! No wonder you think they're not that powerful, if you don't even know ba…

> You really owe it to yourself to try them out. I've worked at multiple AI startups in lead AI Engineering roles, both working on deploying user facing LLM products and working on the research end of LLMs. I've done collaborative projects and demos with a pretty wide range of big names in this space (but don't want to doxx myself too aggressively), have had my LLM work cited on HN multiple times, have LLM based gith…

Seriously, all that familiarity and you think an LLM "literally" can't invent anything that didn't already exist?

Like, I'm sorry, but you're just flat-out wrong and I've got the proof sitting on my hard drive. I use this supposedly impossible program daily.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#176

Post by fantasizr »

DrewADesign wrote: post #40

You’re absolutely right! You astutely observed that 2025 was a year with many LLMs and this was a selection of waypoints, summarized in a helpful timeline. That’s what most non-tech-person’s year in LLMs looked like. Hopefully 2026 will be the year where companies realize that implementing intrusive chatbots can’t make better ::waving hands:: ya know… UX or whatever. For some reason, they think its helpful to distrac…

I took the good with the bad: the ai assisted coding tools are a multiplier, google ai overviews in search results are half baked (at best) and often just factually wrong. AI was put in the instagram search bar for no practical purpose etc.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#177

Post by jjude »

zahlman wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how badly my 2025 predictions aged I'm probably going to sit that one out! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/10/ai-predictions/

Making predictions is useful even when they turn out very wrong. Consider also giving confidence levels, so that you can calibrate going forward.

I use predictions to prepare rather than to plan.

Planing depends on deterministic view of the future. I used to plan (esp annual plans) until about 5 years. Now I scan for trends and prepare myself for different scenarios that can come in the future. Even if you get it approximately right, you stand apart.

For tech trends, I read Simon, Benedict Evans, Mary Meeker etc. Simon is in a better position make these predictions than anyone else having closely analyzed these trends over the last few years.

Here I wrote about my approach: https://www.jjude.com/shape-the-future/

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#178

Post by MitziMoto »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

> The (only?) year of MCP I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.

MCP isn't going anywhere. Some developers can't seem to see past their terminal or dev environment when it comes to MCP. Skills, etc do not replace MCP and MCP is far more than just documentation searching.

MCP is a great way for an LLM to connect to an external system in a standardized way and immediately understand what tools it has available, when and how to use them, what their inputs and outputs are,etc.

For example, we built a custom MCP server for our CRM. Now our voice and chat agents that run on elevenlabs infrastructure can connect to our system with one endpoint, understand what actions it can take, and what information it needs to collect from the user to perform those actions.

I guess this could maybe be done with webhooks or an API spec with a well crafted prompt? Or if eleven labs provided an executable environment with tool calling? But at some point you're just reinventing a lot of the functionality you get for free from MCP, and all major LLMs seem to know how to use MCP already.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#179

Post by bigyabai »

handoflixue wrote: post #175
crystal_revenge wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You really owe it to yourself to try them out. I've worked at multiple AI startups in lead AI Engineering roles, both working on deploying user facing LLM products and working on the research end of LLMs. I've done collaborative projects and demos with a pretty wide range of big names in this space (but don't want to doxx myself too aggressively), have had my LLM work cited on HN multiple times, have LLM based gith…

Seriously, all that familiarity and you think an LLM "literally" can't invent anything that didn't already exist? Like, I'm sorry, but you're just flat-out wrong and I've got the proof sitting on my hard drive. I use this supposedly impossible program daily.

FWIW, your "evidence" is a text editor. I'm glad you made a tool that works for you, but the parent's point stands; this is a 200-level course-curriculum homework assignment. Tens of thousands of homemade editors exist, in various states of disrepair and vain overengineering.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#180

Post by simonw »

MitziMoto wrote: post #178
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

> The (only?) year of MCP I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.

MCP isn't going anywhere. Some developers can't seem to see past their terminal or dev environment when it comes to MCP. Skills, etc do not replace MCP and MCP is far more than just documentation searching. MCP is a great way for an LLM to connect to an external system in a standardized way and immediately understand what tools it has available, when and how to use them, what their inputs and outputs are,etc. For exa…

Yeah, I don't think I was particularly clear in that section.

I don't think MCP is going to go away, but I do think it's unlikely to ever achieve the level of excitement it had in early 2025 again.

If you're not building inside a code execution environment it's a very good option for plugging tools into LLMs, especially across different systems that support the same standard.

But code execution environments are so much more powerful and flexible!

I expect that once we come up with a robust, inexpensive way to run a little Bash environment - I'm still hoping WebAssembly gets us there - there will be much less reason to use MCP even outside of coding agent setups.

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