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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

#131

Post by jillesvangurp »

RobinL wrote: post #101
conception wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude in Office was a tipping point for nontechnical folks around me. Everyone’s slides decks are immaculate now. Finance isn’t needing nearly as much BI help. It’s pretty impressive.

Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?

With a little bit of work, it works very well. You can generate powerpoint directly with Codex or Claude Cowork. There is also Canva support for these tools and it has its own AI integration. Another useful tool in this space is the Gemini integration in Google slides.

If you are a bit technical, reveal.js is actually really nice for this. I one shotted a pdf export for that uses a headless browser. I've used that a few times now.

What works well for me is to take an existing presentation and then some raw input and generate a new presentation in the same style as the old one from the raw input. After that, I can go in and tweak individual slides.

Another thing I did recently was take somebody's existing pitch deck and fix it with a one line prompt: "this deck is a bit meh, pimp it!" that worked unreasonably well. I like using shitty prompts like that. Codex often manages to do the right thing if you don't overthink your prompts.

Classic deck of somebody that used way too much text and only bullets. It did a great job on that presenting the content in a more simple and better structured way. Pulling out key facts and highlighting those, simplifying text, etc. Doing that manually would have taken hours.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#132

Post by Quothling »

LZ_Khan wrote: 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 think Claude Cowork through the Microsoft thing which was copilot but is now named M365 (or something?) is likely creating every powerpoint resentation within our organisation at this point.

We have whatever AI is in teams transcribe every meeting, and it's scaringly good at it. It's also extremely good at sumerizing or finding things from pervious meetings when tasked. One disadvantage in this, is that I can see how stupid I sound on writing. I'll go "yeah, hmm, yeah, that's, yeah", but it really is pretty good.

I assume we're going to see a massive increase in AI with this Cowork inside the Microsoft client. We actually have a better tool available through a librechat where you can create and configure your own agents with the same filesystem access to your one drive, and a lot more tools and models than just Claude. Almost nobody has been capable of figuring out how to use it though, so they've been using the regular office365 copilot and it sucks so bad that a lot of people stopped beliving in AI.

It's ironic that Microsoft fumbling the ball on AI, but being very good at enterprise customers (especially non-IT) means that they'll likely be the company which is going to sell us AI tools that people will actually use. I have no idea why it's so hard for people to pick up the Librechat tool we're given access to through our equity fund. It's quite litterally a copy of ChatGPT where you can point-and-click configure an agent, but we're seeing that even employees who use a lot of ChatGPT privately don't use this tool professionally. Meanwhile everyone has been capable of using the Microsoft thing (that I personally think is less user friendly since you will need to add your configuration files to every promt).

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#133

Post by komali2 »

viccis wrote: post #44
kvakkefly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this very clearly myself. Before opus 4.5, I was doing a lot of hand holding and was coding a lot myself, but I have not written code since that day more or less. I did write some stuff myself just to learn how the enigma encryption machine worked, so wrote myself to learn. But professionally, I stopped coding in November.

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?

There is no good justification for anyone's salary really, except perhaps doctors and underwater welders.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#134

Post by stuxnet79 »

trojans1290 wrote: post #95
vanuatu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there will be larger markets, more companies, more jobs than before due to AI, but also a very painful transition period AI reduces the cost of producing software (and other intellectual tasks), which greatly improves the viability for more and more ambitious projects. As far as we know the amount of problems software (and humanity) can solve is unbounded It feels like the market has shifted in SWE yet again…

What are these skills?

This is the magic question that I'm very eager to hear the answer to.

Fundamentally, steering LLMs requires the same structured, logical thought process that is required to write code, regardless of abstraction level. Unlike what HN would have you believe this is not a skill that is equally distributed across the population.

But given the rapid pace at which this technology is evolving, "steering" may very well be ceded to the clankers. LLM agents are fantastic at logical reasoning & any inefficiencies relative to human experts can be circumvented by sheer compute.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#136

Post by IshKebab »

pastel8739 wrote: post #124
viccis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you justify your salary given that you're just using a tool that any of us could use for $20 an hour in your role?

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.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#137

Post by [deleted] »

energy123 wrote: post #45
zarzavat wrote: 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.

The quality of the Gemini pelican was such a step change in one iteration, while the other benchmarks remained quite flat, that I think you are right. Although whether they targeted Pelicans in particular or just svg, I can't say.

[deleted]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#138

Post by sph »

wilg wrote: post #87
dmpk2k wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find your emotional language truly quite fascinating. I've heard people talk like that about drugs.

Similarly, I've heard people talk like that about things that are not drugs.

You can get a dopamine rush from anything, from drugs to using LLMs.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#140

Post by nothinkjustai »

magicalhippo wrote: post #92
Insanity wrote: post #10

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…

None of it is non-trivial tho. You might think so, but it’s not.
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