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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

simonwillison.net

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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you justify your salary given that you sit in a chair all day, likely making the world worse, and make 5x as much as someone saving lives, building houses, or teaching kids how to read?

Supply and demand. Not many people are good at programming and it's highly in demand. The question is how many people will be good at vibe coding? If the answer is "lots" then we can definitely expect programming salaries to return to "normal" levels. His question is very relevant; you can't dismiss it as easily as that.

it can be easily dismissed because "anyone can use the tool that costs $20" makes no meaningful sense.

this was always true in fact $20 is more than the free it costs for notepad++

it's a flippant statement. Go down the line of any tool; it's cost has basically nothing to do with skill difference to operate it. See basically everything. There's levels.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#153
post #116
post #57

I'm curious how the 6 months have looked from a non-programmer's perspective. What kind of co-working tools and similar optimizations have people from other fields experienced?

I am an instructor who helps deliver an apprenticeship. My new boss has been in our industry for about 20 years and is one of the most respected people in our company. They've just joined us to teach and are off doing a two week course. On the first day she was told to let AI write all of her lesson plans, and then feed the lesson plans to AI to make her slides... Hopefully she rejects all this out of hand, but if sh…

I’m teaching a class at a university in Japan (on AI-related issues, as it happens). I’ve been teaching for more than 40 years, but at 106 registered students this is by far the largest class I have ever taught. AI tools are very helpful for class management, such as keeping track of attendance and homework submissions.

I have to consciously avoid using AI for more cognitive tasks, though. It would be very tempting to have Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini summarize, classify, and grade the students’ assignments, write individual feedback, prepare my lesson plans, etc. However, I know that my engagement with the material and with the students would suffer. I also want to show the students that they are learning together with me and with each other, not with bots.

I am semiretired and have a light teaching load that gives me plenty of time to prepare for class. I can see that full-time teachers might find it hard to resist the lure of offloading their thinking to AI.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#155

I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.

I've "vibed" some non-trivial stuff lately using a combination of Codex with 5.5 and Claude Code with Opus 4.7. Key has been to spend a fair amount of time on initial overall design document, which is split into tangible and limited phases. I go back and forth between them on this document until we're all happy. For each phase an implementation plan is made. At the end, a summary document of what was delivered and wh…

That’s not vibing, but waterfall development.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#156
> Google released the Gemma 4 series of models, which are the most capable open weight models I’ve seen from a US company.

Implying another country has a better model? I'm being pokey here because I'm very curious! I know Gemma is efficient, but I also remember Qwen and Kiwi being referred to as optimized. The difference being that Gemma is using less tokens, but maybe Qwen/Kiwi's quality is higher? I dont know.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#157
post #5

Somewhere right now some human artist is being tasked with drawing illustrations of pelicans riding bicycles to be used as training data at a big AI lab.

Every modern image-generation model can generate a pelican on a bicycle trivially. The point of the test is to generate SVG text that represents an image, which is more complicated. Yes, there are ways to convert raster images to SVG for use in training data but it's not a good use of anyone's time.

I don't understand this response. Human artists can and do make SVGs.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#159

I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.

Paradox - you can get multiple inflection points even as systems start to have dimishing marginal returns in core capability, I think this is due to 'threshold crossing' where something 'becomes good enough for a specific purpose' - it just unlocks capabilities. 'Nail Guns' used to be heavy, required heavy power cords, they were extremely expensive. When they got lighter, cheaper, battery pack ... at some point, they…

This is a great analogy. Jan/Feb this year was when the models crossed from useful to essential.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#160

I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle. They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.

Paradox - you can get multiple inflection points even as systems start to have dimishing marginal returns in core capability, I think this is due to 'threshold crossing' where something 'becomes good enough for a specific purpose' - it just unlocks capabilities. 'Nail Guns' used to be heavy, required heavy power cords, they were extremely expensive. When they got lighter, cheaper, battery pack ... at some point, they…

Nitpick but commercial roofers prefer pneumatic over battery.
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