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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

#191

Post by drdaeman »

grey-area wrote: post #173
jimbobthemighty wrote: post #161

I asked Gemini for a video of 'pelican riding a unicycle in hyde park' - I was blown away by the output: https://gemini.google.com/share/55e250c99693

That’s really impressive, and slightly worrying for creatives involved in film, animation or modelling.

It’s the opposite, non-creatives (if such roles even exist in those industries) should be worried. All those models offset technical skills, allowing to get from idea to implementation through a different route (which can be easier or harder depending on idea and model - good luck tweaking that pelican’s exact pose and movements to match your imagination precisely). Nothing touches creativity, not even in the slightest.

But there’s a lot of panicking, fear-mongering and all sorts of nonsense around this whole subject.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#192

Post by Arn_Thor »

_puk wrote: post #26
throwaway2027 wrote: post #8

December 2025 was the breakthrough for me. January Claude was euphoric, ChatGPT was up there. February Gemini cooked for a second there. March amazing. April the big bad nerf. May GPT 5.5 is just pure bliss altough 2x limits temporarily, not sure about Claude it's sort of okay still not as good as it felt before, slowly increasing limits with more compute and rebuilding good will.

I think Opus 4.6 at its peak was the "how can anyone not get that this is good" for me. Then the nerf, and the massive uplift in tokens for 4.7, a model which I find lazy and prone to hallucinate. It's probably time to try GPT5.5. Like many I'm pretty heavily invested in the anthropic ecosystem at this point, which I suppose gives another strong reason to make the switch.

I was a dedicated Claude user but in March/April I started using GPT5.5 on a new project that Claude had tried and failed to execute successfully. GPT knocked it out of the park, and was able to do it within my subscription allocation of tokens. I'd recommend giving it a go at least. Something like OpenClaude can let you use the Claude tools you're used to

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#194

Post by bradley13 »

As someone who uses AI daily (not in agent mode, just user-interactive), I have definitely noticed major quality improvements over the past few months. And that's surprising, because when you use something daily, you tend to overlook the big jumps.

I haven't looked into any sort of "agent" mode, just because I don't yet quite trust the AI not to do something dumb. Also, I don't use M365, where Copilot is integrated, so I suppose I would have to set it up myself.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#195

Post by peepee1982 »

Timwi wrote: post #103
musebox35 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please see Ben Evans’ podcast on a good take on this. Coding is just one of the task you do in your job, it is not the job or at least it probably is not. You do not get paid to code, you get paid to make a set of decisions that create value to the company. If this is automated then yes sadly your salary is not justified.

> Coding is just one of the task[s] you do in your job But it's by far the most fun part and the only reason to take such a job...

I agree, but the reality is that most people work to make a living, not to have fun. If you enjoy your job because you mostly get to write code in a tight feedback loop instead of doing the "hard" work of planning, writing and reviewing specs, balancing customer requirements, and the lot, you have a very privileged life. And those jobs are probably going to get fewer now.

It's kind of sad. But on the other hand, I am glad I don't have to write every little line of code myself *on top* of having to do all the other stuff.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#196

Post by ben_w »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #179
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 find it gets you past the starting line but when you dig into the code it’s a mess of duplicated code, muddled responsibilities, poor architecture, 10k line files that eat your tokens, etc. I’m building something using LLMs to scrape websites/socials for unstructured event data from combined text/images and the only way I’ve managed to get 100% consistent results for a reasonable cost is to break the task down into…

Indeed. To add to this, the obvious solution (ask the AI to break down the tasks to whatever METR says they'd be capable of 80% of the time) is of limited utility, as the AI are only so-so at estimating task complexity.

(Even when they're getting the planning part right, I do also recommend checking the LLM-generated unit tests, because in my experience some of those are "regex the source code" not "execute functions and check outputs").

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#198

Post by beng-nl »

angled wrote: post #111
beng-nl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who works somewhere where the intranet is a bit of a jungle: what tool do you use to scour the intranet? Thanks!

Copilot Cowork in the M365 ecosystem. It inherits all the permissions from my account, has access to exchange to send me emails, and OneDrive to save each day’s summary for posterity and future refinement.

Thank you, I will try to find it. Thanks!

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#199

Post by sevenzero »

notachatbot123 wrote: post #177
grey-area wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s really impressive, and slightly worrying for creatives involved in film, animation or modelling.

Even more worrying are the implications for fakenews, propaganda, fraud, deception and mental health.

This is really my biggest worry when it gets to consumer AI. People already have a hard time informing themselves properly. Now we have technology that just boosts the already existing confirmation bias people have. It's sickening.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#200

Post by colinb »

drdaeman wrote: post #191
grey-area wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s really impressive, and slightly worrying for creatives involved in film, animation or modelling.

It’s the opposite, non-creatives (if such roles even exist in those industries) should be worried. All those models offset technical skills, allowing to get from idea to implementation through a different route (which can be easier or harder depending on idea and model - good luck tweaking that pelican’s exact pose and movements to match your imagination precisely ). Nothing touches creativity, not even in the slight…

The truly excellent weavers will be fine?
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