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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#121

Post by johnfn »

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?

I believe the spikiness in response is because AI itself is spiky - it’s incredibly good at some classes of tasks, and remarkably poor at others. People who use it on the spikes are genuinely amazed because of how good it is. This does nothing but annoy the people who use it in the troughs, who become increasingly annoyed that everyone seems to be losing their mind over something that can’t even do (whatever).

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#122

Post by raincole »

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…

The early internet and smartphones (the Japanese ones, not iPhone) were definitely not "immediately" adopted by the mass, unlike LLM.

If "immediate" usefulness is the metric we measure, then the internet and smartphones are pretty insignificant inventions compared to LLM.

(of course it's not a meaningful metric, as there is no clear line between a dumb phone and a smart phone, or a moderately sized language model and a LLM)

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#123

Post by Night_Thastus »

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.

LLMs hold some real utility. But that real utility is buried under a mountain of fake hype and over-promises to keep shareholder value high.

LLMs have real limitations that aren't going away any time soon - not until we move to a new technology fundamentally different and separate from them - sharing almost nothing in common. There's a lot of 'progress-washing' going on where people claim that these shortfalls will magically disappear if we throw enough data and compute at it when they clearly will not.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#124

Post by wh0knows »

Davidzheng wrote: post #119
beardedwizard wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Curious if you have any links about the rapid progression of robotics (as someone who is not educated on the topic).

It was my feeling with robotics that the more challenging aspect will be making them economically viable rather than simply the challenge of the task itself.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#125

Post by Gigachad »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #123
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.

LLMs hold some real utility. But that real utility is buried under a mountain of fake hype and over-promises to keep shareholder value high. LLMs have real limitations that aren't going away any time soon - not until we move to a new technology fundamentally different and separate from them - sharing almost nothing in common. There's a lot of 'progress-washing' going on where people claim that these shortfalls will m…

Pretty much. What actually exists is very impressive. But what was promised and marketed has not been delivered.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#126

Post by fragmede »

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…

> The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level.

Those are some very rosy glasses you've got on there. The nascent Internet took forever to catch on. It was for weird nerds at universities and it'll never catch on, but here we are.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#127

Post by BobbyJo »

ori_b wrote: post #35
websiteapi wrote: post #24

I'm curious how all of the progress will be seen if it does indeed result in mass unemployment (but not eradication) of professional software engineers.

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.

I would have agreed with this a few months ago, but something Ive learned is that the ability to verify an LLMs output is paramount to its value. In software, you can review its output, add tests, on top of other adversarial techniques to verify the output immediately after generation.

With most other knowledge work, I don't think that is the case. Maybe actuarial or accounting work, but most knowledge work exists at a cross section of function and taste, and the latter isn't an automatically verifiable output.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#128

Post by aoeusnth1 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #120
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…

We're very clearly seeing exponential progress - even above trend, on METR, whose slope keeps getting revised to a higher and higher estimate each time. Explain your perspective on the objective evidence against exponential progress?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#129

Post by probably_wrong »

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.

Speaking for myself: because if the hype were to be believed we should have no relational databases when there's MongoDB, no need for dollars when there's cryptocoins, all virtual goods would be exclusively sold as NFTs, and we would be all driving self-driving cars by now.

LLMs are being driven mostly by grifters trying to achieve a monopoly before they run out of cash. Under those conditions I find their promises hard to believe. I'll wait until they either go broke or stop losing money left and right, and whatever is left is probably actually useful.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#130

Post by simonw »

probably_wrong wrote: post #129
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.

Speaking for myself: because if the hype were to be believed we should have no relational databases when there's MongoDB, no need for dollars when there's cryptocoins, all virtual goods would be exclusively sold as NFTs, and we would be all driving self-driving cars by now. LLMs are being driven mostly by grifters trying to achieve a monopoly before they run out of cash. Under those conditions I find their promises h…

The way I've been handling the deafening hype is to focus exclusively on what the models that we have right now can do.

You'll note I don't mention AGI or future model releases in my annual roundup at all. The closest I get to that is expressing doubt that the METR chart will continue at the same rate.

If you focus exclusively on what actually works the LLM space is a whole lot more interesting and less frustrating.

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