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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#191

Post by throwaway7783 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #182
CamperBob2 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the confusion is people's misunderstanding of what 'new code' and 'new imagery' mean. Yes, LLMs can generate a specific CRUD webapp that hasn't existed before but only based on interpolating between the history of existing CRUD webapps. I mean traditional Markov Chains can also produce 'new' text in the sense that "this exact text" hasn't been seen before, but nobody would argue that traditional Markov Chains…

Would you say that LLMs can discover patterns hitherto unknown? It would still be generating from the past, but patterns/connections not made before.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#192

Post by dang »

_zagj wrote: post #103
dang wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs, which are one of the major topics at present. That's not spam.

> He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs Is he, really? Most of his blog posts are little more than opportunistic, buttressing commentary on someone else's blog post or article, often with a bit of AI apologia sprinkled in (for example, marginalizing people as paranoid for not taking AI companies at their word that they aren't aggressively scraping websites in violation of robots.txt, or exfiltrating user data…

Please stop.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#193

Post by simonw »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #187

Speaking of asynchronous agents, what do people use? Claude Code for web is extremely limited, because you have no custom tools. Claude Code in GitHub Actions is vastly more useful, due to the custom environment, but ackward to use interactively. Are there any good alternatives?

I use Claude Code for web with an environment allowing full internet access, which means it can install extra tools as and when it needs them. I don't run into limits with it very often.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#194

Post by least »

bigyabai wrote: post #179
handoflixue wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference between those is the person is actually using this text editor that they built with the help of LLMs. There's plenty of people creating novel scripts and programs that can accommodate their own unique specifications.

If a programmer creating their own software (or contracting it out to a developer) would be a bespoke suit and using software someone or some company created without your input is an off the rack suit, I'd liken these sorts of programs as semi-bespoke, or made to measure.

"LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past" feels like an odd statement. I think the point they're going for is that it's not thinking and so it's not going to produce new ideas like a human would? But literally no technology does that. That is all derived from some human beings being particularly clever.

LLMs are tools. They can enable a human to create new things because they are interfacing with a human to facilitate it. It's merging the functional knowledge and vision of a person and translating it into something else.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#195

Post by simonw »

apolloartemis wrote: post #186

Thank you for your warning about the normalization of deviance. Do you think there will be an AI agent software worm like NotPetya which will cause a lot of economic damage?

I'm expecting something like a malicious prompt injection which steals API keys and crypto wallets and uses additional tricks to spread itself further.

Or targeted prompt injections - like spear phishing attacks - against people with elevated privileges (think root sysadmins) who are known to be using coding agents.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#196

Post by District5524 »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #145
throw1235435 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe this - I think it will probably just disrupt software engineering and any other digital medium with mass internet publication (i.e. things RLVR can use). For the short term future it seems to need a lot of data to train on, and no other profession has posted the same amount of verifiable material. The open source altruism has disrupted the profession in the end; just not in the way people first predict…

I mean law and accounting usually have a “right” answer that you can verify against. I can see a test data set being built for most professions. I’m sure open source helps with programming data but I doubt that’s even the majority of their training. If you have a company like Google you could collect data on decades of software work in all its dimensions from your workforce

It's not about invalidating your conclusion, but I'm not so sure about law having a right answer. At a very basic level, like hypothetical conduct used in basic legal training matrerials or MCQs, or in criminal/civil code based situations in well-abstracting Roman law-based jurisdictions, definitely. But the actual work, at least for most lawyers is to build on many layers of such abstractions to support your/client's viwepoint. And that level is already about persuasion of other people, not having the "right" legal argument or applying the most correct case found. And this part is not documented well, approaches changes a lot, even if law remains the same. Think of family law or law of succession - does not change much over centuries but every day, worldwide, millions of people spend huge amounts of money and energy on finding novel ways to turn those same paragraphs to their advantage and put their "loved" ones and relatives in a worse position.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#197

Post by PeterHolzwarth »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #182
CamperBob2 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the confusion is people's misunderstanding of what 'new code' and 'new imagery' mean. Yes, LLMs can generate a specific CRUD webapp that hasn't existed before but only based on interpolating between the history of existing CRUD webapps. I mean traditional Markov Chains can also produce 'new' text in the sense that "this exact text" hasn't been seen before, but nobody would argue that traditional Markov Chains…

Just an innocent bystander here, so forgive me, but I think the flack you are getting is because you appear to be responding to claims that these tools will reinvent everything and introduce a new halcyon age of creation - when, at least on hacker news, and definitely in this thread, no one is really making such claims.

Put another way, and I hate to throw in the now over-used phrase, but I feel you may be responding to a strawman that doesn't much appear in the article or the discussion here: "Because these tools don't achieve a god-like level of novel perfection that no one is really promising here, I dismiss all this sorta crap."

Especially when I think you are also admitting that the technology is a fairly useful tool on its own merits - a stance which I believe represents the bulk of the feelings that supporters of the tech here on HN are describing.

I apologize if you feel I am putting unrepresentative words in your mouth, but this is the reading I am taking away from your comments.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#200

Post by Madmallard »

didip wrote: post #67

Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief? But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

Have you tried using it for anything actually complicated?

Lol. It's worse than nothing at all.

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