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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#111

Post by chii »

SgtBastard wrote: post #99
snigsnog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI. The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too d…

… the internet was not immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. Even if you skip ARPAnet, you’re forgetting the Gopher days and even if you jump straight to WWW+email==the internet, you’re forgetting the mosaic days. The applications that became useful to the masses emerged a decade+ after the public internet and even then, it took 2+ decades to reach anything approaching saturation. Yo…

the "usefulness" excuse is irrelevant, and the claim that phones/internet is "immediately useful" is just a post hoc rationalization. It's basically trying to find a reasonable reason why opposition to AI is valid, and is not in self-interest.

The opposition to AI is from people who feel threatened by it, because it either threatens their livelihood (or family/friends'), and that they feel they are unable to benefit from AI in the same way as they had internet/mobile phones.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#112

Post by DrewADesign »

ronsor wrote: post #53
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…

> For some reason, they think its helpful to distractingly pop up chat windows on their site... Companies have been doing this "live support" nonsense far longer than LLMs have been popular.

There was also source point pollution before the Industrial Revolution. Useless, forced, irritating chat was ‘nowhere close’ to as aggressive or pervasive as it is now. It used to be a niche feature of some CRMs and now it’s everywhere.

I’m on LinkedIn Learning digging into something really technical and practical and it’s constantly pushing the chat fly out with useless pre-populated prompts like “what are the main takeaways from this video.” And they moved their main page search to a little icon on the title bar and sneakily now what used to be the obvious, primary central search field for years sends a prompt to their fucking chatbot.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#113

Post by chii »

beardedwizard wrote: post #52
ori_b wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction: If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work. Given the state of robotics, manual labor is likely to outlive intellectual labor.

"Given the state of robotics" reminds me a lot of what was said about llms and image/video models over the past 3 years. Considering how much llms improved, how long can robotics be in this state? I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor. "This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.

but robotics had the means to do majority of the physical labour already - it's just not worth the money to replace humans, as human labour is cheap (and flexible - more than robots).

With knowledge work being less high-paying, physical labour supply should increase as well, which drops their price. This means it's actually less likely that the advent of LLM will make physical labour more automated.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#114

Post by zvolsky »

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.

The idea of HN being dismissive of impactful technology is as old as HN. And indeed, the crowd often appears stuck in the past with hindsight. That said, HN discussions aren't homogeneous, and as demonstrated by Karpathy in his recent blogpost "Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News", at least some commenters have impressive foresight: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#115

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#116

Post by Davidzheng »

chii wrote: post #109
cebert wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people feel threatened by the rapid advancements in LLMs, fearing that their skills may become obsolete, and in turn act irrationally. To navigate this change effectively, we must keep open minds, keep adaptable, and embrace continuous learning.

> in turn act irrationally it isn't irrational to act in self-interest. If LLM threatens someone's livelihood, it matters not that it helps humanity overall one bit - they will oppose it. I don't blame them. But i also hope that they cannot succeed in opposing it.

It's irrational to genuinely hold false beliefs about capabilities of LLMs. But at this point I assume around half of the skeptics are emotionally motivated anyway.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#117

Post by thisoneisreal »

syndacks wrote: post #89

I can’t get over the range of sentiment on LLMs. HN leans snake oil, X leans “we’re all cooked” —- can it possibly be both? How do other folks make sense of this? I’m not asking for a side, rather understanding the range. Does the range lead you to believe X over Y?

My take (no more informed than anyone else's) is that the range indicates this is a complex phenomenon that people are still making sense of. My suspicion is that something like the following is going on:

1. LLMs can do some truly impressive things, like taking natural language instructions and producing compiling, functional code as output. This experience is what turns some people into cheerleaders.

2. Other engineers see that in real production systems, LLMs lack sufficient background / domain knowledge to effectively iterate. They also still produce output, but it's verbose and essentially missing the point of a desired change.

3. LLMs also can be used by people who are not knowledgeable to "fake it," and produce huge amounts of output that is basically besides-the-point bullshit. This makes those same senior folks very, very resentful, because it wastes a huge amount of their time. This isn't really the fault of the tool, but it's a common way the tool gets used and so it gets tarnished by association.

4. There is a ridiculous amount of complexity in some of these tools and workflows people are trying to invent, some of which is of questionable value. So aside from the tools themselves people are skeptical of the people trying to become thought leaders in this space and the sort of wild hacks they're coming up with.

5. There are real macro questions about whether these tools can be made economical to justify whatever value they do produce, and broader questions about their net impact on society.

6. Last but not least, these tools poke at the edges of "intelligence," the crown jewel of our species and also a big source of status for many people in the engineering community. It's natural that we're a little sensitive about the prospect of anything that might devalue or democratize the concept.

That's my take for what it's worth. It's a complex phenomenon that touches all of these threads, so not only do you see a bunch of different opinions, but the same person might feel bullish about one aspect and bearish about another.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#118

Post by nen-nomad »

snigsnog wrote: post #81
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.

The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI. The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too d…

ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#119

Post by Davidzheng »

beardedwizard wrote: post #52
ori_b wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prediction: If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work. Given the state of robotics, manual labor is likely to outlive intellectual labor.

"Given the state of robotics" reminds me a lot of what was said about llms and image/video models over the past 3 years. Considering how much llms improved, how long can robotics be in this state? I have to think 3 years from now we will be having the same conversation about robots doing real physical labor. "This is the worst they will ever be" feels more apt.

Robotics is coming FAST. Faster than LLM progress in my opinion.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#120

Post by crystal_revenge »

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.

> I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs

I find LLMs incredibly useful, but if you were following along the last few years the promise was for “exponential progress” with a teaser world destroying super intelligence.

We objectively are not on that path. There is no “coming of LLMs”. We might get some incremental improvement, but we’re very clearly seeing sigmoid progress.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m tired of hyperbolic rants that are unquestionably not justified (the nice thing about exponential progress is you don’t need to argue about it)

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