Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

Post by Jaxan » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 5:46 PM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #172

piker wrote: post #45

> There are certain tasks, like improving a given program for speed, for instance, where in theory the model can continue to make progress with a very clear reward signal for a very long time. Super skeptical of this claim. Yes, if I have some toy poorly optimized python example or maybe a sorting algorithm in ASM, but this won’t work in any non-trivial case. My intuition is that the LLM will spin its wheels at a loc…

> but this won’t work in any non-trivial case Earlier this year google shared that one of their projects (I think it was alphaevolve) found an optimisation in their stack that sped up their real world training runs by 1%. As we're talking about google here, we can be pretty sure it wasn't some trivial python trick that they missed. Anyhow, at ~100M$ / training run, that's a 1M$ save right there. Each and every time t…

Post by mvkel » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #134

mvkel wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One only has to go read the original vibe coding thread[0] from ...ten months ago(!) to see the resistance and skepticism loud and clear. The very first comment couldn't be more loud about it. It was possible to create things in gpt-3.5. The difference now is it aligns with the -taste- of discerning programmers, which has a little, but not everything, to do with technological capability. [0] https://news.ycombinator.…

> The difference now is it aligns with the -taste- of discerning programmers This... doesn't match the field reports I've seen here, nor what I've seen from poking around the repos for AI-powered Show HN submissions.

Post by heliumtera » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 5:58 PM UTC

preisschild wrote: post #161

raincole wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using AI to ask for medical advice So the number of anti-vaxxers is going to plummet drastically in the following decade, I guess.

Depends if they use lobotomized bots like Grok...

Post by jennyholzer2 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 6:01 PM UTC

russfink wrote: post #199

Practical question: when getting the AI to teach you something, eg how attention can be focused in LLMs, how do you know it’s teaching you correct theory? Can I use a metric of internal consistency, repeatedly querying it and other models with a summary of my understanding? What do you all do?

Post by jennyholzer2 » Sat, Dec 20, 2025, 6:05 PM UTC

squidbeak wrote: post #109

Fraterkes wrote: post #26

It’s interesting that half the comments here are talking about the extinction line when, now that we’re nearly entering 2026, I feel the 2027 predictions have been shown to be pretty wrong so far.

> I feel the 2027 predictions have been shown to be pretty wrong so far Does your clairvoyance go any further than 2027?