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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#141

Post by vunderba »

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.

Eh. I wouldn’t be so quick to speak for the entirety of HN. Several articles related to LLMs easily hit the front page every single day, so clearly there are plenty of HN users upvoting them.

I think you're just reading too much into what is more likely classic HN cynicism and/or fatigue.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#142

Post by thunky »

skydhash wrote: post #69
n2d4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely dismissive. Claude Code helps me make a majority of changes to our codebase now, particularly small ones, and is an insane efficiency boost. You may not have the same experience for one reason or another, but plenty of devs do, so "nothing happened" is absolutely wrong. 2024 was a lot of talk, a lot of "AI could hypothetically do this and that". 2025 was the year where it genuinely started to enter…

And this is one of the vague "AI helped me do more". This is me touting for Emacs Emacs was a great plus for me over the last year. The integration with various tooling with comint (REPL integration), compile (build or report tools), TUI (through eat or ansi-term), gave me a unified experience through the buffer paradigm of emacs. Using the same set of commands boosted my editing process and the easy addition of new…

> This is how easy it is to write a non-vague "tool X helped me" and I'm not even an English native speaker.

Your example is very vague.

See if you can spot the problem in my review of Excel in your style:

"It's great and I like how it's formula paradigm gave me a unified experience. It's table features boosted my science workflows last year".

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#143

Post by password4321 »

tkgally wrote: post #39
AndyNemmity wrote: post #2

These are excellent every year, thank you for all the wonderful work you do.

Same here. Simon is one of the main reasons I’ve been able to (sort of) keep up with developments in AI. I look forward to learning from his blog posts and HN comments in the year ahead, too.

Don't forget you can pay Simon to keep up with less!

> At the end of every month I send out a much shorter newsletter to anyone who sponsors me for $10 or more on GitHub

https://simonwillison.net/about/#monthly

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#144

Post by llmslave2 »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #128
crystal_revenge wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Pretty neat how this exponential progress hasn't resulted in exponential productivity. Perhaps you could explain your perspective on that?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#145

Post by coffeebeqn »

throw1235435 wrote: post #136
BobbyJo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#147

Post by llmslave2 »

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?

Because there is a wide range of what people consider good. If you look at that the people on X consider to be good, it's not very surprising.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#148

Post by viraptor »

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.

Based on quite a few comments recently, it also looks like many have tried LLMs in the past, but haven't seriously revisited either the modern or more expensive models. And I get it. Not everyone wants to keep up to date every month, or burn cash on experiments. But at the same time, people seem to have opinions formed in 2024. (Especially if they talk about just hallucinations and broken code - tell the agent to search for docs and fix stuff) I'd really like to give them Opus 4.5 as an agent to refresh their views. There's lots to complain about, but the world has moved on significantly.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#149

Post by sexy_seedbox »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #108

Thank you. Enjoyed this read. AI slop videos will no doubt get longer and "more realistic" in 2026. I really hope social media companies plaster a prominent banner over them which screams, "Likely/Made by AI" and give us the option to automatically mute these videos from our timeline. That would be the responsible thing to do. But I can't see Alphabet doing that on YT, xAI doing that on X or Meta doing that on FB/Ins…

For image generation, it's already too realistic with Z-Image + Custom LoRas + SeedVR2 upscaling.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#150

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

> The (only?) year of MCP I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.

MCP or skills? Can a skill negate the need for MCP. In addition there was a YC startup who is looking at searching docs for LLMs or similar. I think MCP may be less needed once you have skills, openapi specs, and other things that LLMs can call directly.
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