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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#211

Post by minimaxir »

rvz wrote: post #184
dang wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's one of the most valuable writers on LLMs, which are one of the major topics at present. That's not spam.

It is promotional spam. But given the volume of LLM slop, it was kind of obvious and known that even the moderators now have "favourites" over guidelines. > Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity. [0] The blog itself is clearly used as promotion all the time when the original source(s) are buried deep in the…

The operative word there is "primarily". Simon comments on a variety of topics and has far more interactions that don't link to his blog than do.

Simon's posts are not engagement farming by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#212

Post by [deleted] »

handoflixue wrote: post #158
crystal_revenge wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must have been a long time back. Having lived through the time when web pages were served through CGI and mobile phones only existed in movies, when SVMs where the new hotness in ML and people would write about how weird NNs were, I feel like I've seen a lot more concrete progress in the last few decades than this year. This year honestly feels quite stagnant. LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduc…

> LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past. Funny, I've used them to create my own personalized text editor, perfectly tailored to what I actually want. I'm pretty sure that didn't exist before. It's wild to me how many people who talk about LLM apparently haven't learned how to use them for even very basic tasks like this! No wonder you think they're not that powerful, if you don't even know ba…

[deleted]

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#213

Post by weatherlite »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #172
crystal_revenge wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You really owe it to yourself to try them out. I've worked at multiple AI startups in lead AI Engineering roles, both working on deploying user facing LLM products and working on the research end of LLMs. I've done collaborative projects and demos with a pretty wide range of big names in this space (but don't want to doxx myself too aggressively), have had my LLM work cited on HN multiple times, have LLM based gith…

That's all very impressive, to be sure. But are you sure you're getting the point? As of 2025, LLMs are now very good at writing new code, creating new imagery, and writing original text. They continue to improve at a remarkable rate. They are helping their users create things that didn't exist before. Additionally, they are now very good at searching and utilizing web resources that didn't exist at training time. So…

> So it is absurdly incorrect to say "they can only reproduce the past."

Also , a shitton of what we do economically is reproducing the past with slight tweaks and improvements. We all do very repetitive things and these tools cut the time / personnel needed by a significant factor.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#214

Post by lopatin »

llmslave2 wrote: post #170
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has! CLs/engineer increased by 10% this year. LLMs from late 2024 were nearly worthless as coding agents, so given they have quadrupled in capability since then (exponential growth, btw), it's not surprising to see a modestly positive impact on SWE work. Also, I'm noticing you're not explaining yourself :)

Hey, I'm not the OG commentator, why do I have to explain myself! :) When Fernando Alonso (best rookie btw) goes from 0-60 in 2.4 seconds in his Aston Martin, is it reasonable to assume he will near the speed of light in 20 seconds?

> Hey, I'm not the OG commentator, why do I have to explain myself! :)

The issue is that you're not acknowledging or replying to people's explanations for _why_ they see this as exponential growth. It's almost as if you skimmed through the meat of the comment and then just re-phrased your original idea.

> When Fernando Alonso (best rookie btw) goes from 0-60 in 2.4 seconds in his Aston Martin, is it reasonable to assume he will near the speed of light in 20 seconds?

This comparison doesn't make sense because we know the limits of cars but we don't yet know the limits of LLMs. It's an open question. Whether or not an F1 engine can make it the speed of light in 20 seconds is not an open question.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#215

Post by xboxnolifes »

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?

From my perspective, both show HN and Twitter's normal biases. I view HN as generally leaning toward "new things suck, nothing ever changes", and I view Twitter generally as "Things suck, and everything is getting worse". Both of those align with snake oil and we're all cooked.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#216

Post by gverrilla »

vanderZwan wrote: post #93

Speaking of new year and AI: my phone just suggested "Happy Birthday!" as the quick-reply to any "Happy New Year!" notification I got in the last hours. I'm not too worried about my job just yet.

This year I had a spotify and a youtube thing to "recall my year", and it was abolute garbage (30% truth, to be exact). I think they're doing it more like an exercise to build up systems, infra, processes, people, etc - it's already clear they don't actually care about users.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#217

Post by lopatin »

simonw wrote: post #199
lopatin wrote: post #198

The "pelicans on a bike" challenge is pretty wide spread now. Are we sure it's still not being trained on?

See https://simonwillison.net/2025/nov/13/training-for-pelicans-... (also in the pelicans section of the post).

> All I’ve ever wanted from life is a genuinely great SVG vector illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle.

:)

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#218

Post by scotty79 »

ryandrake wrote: post #151
SauntSolaire wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead they were building crypto mining warehouses in rural America and propping up artificial currencies like BTC.

Crazy how the two most hyped and funded technologies of the decade were: energy wasting fake money for criminals and energy wasting plagiarism machines.

[flagged]

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#219

Post by scotty79 »

jakeydus wrote: post #174
mgfist wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how people complain about the rust belt dying and factories leaving rural communities and so on, then when someone wants to build something that can provide jobs and tax revenue, everyone complains.

How many people are employed at the average data center? A few dozen? Versus a steel mill, that’s nothing. A chicken plant in Nebraska closed down this last month. 3200 people lost their jobs. You think Meta will fill it with GPUs and the whole town will have jobs again?

Many more are employed while building it. And they will never stop building. It's modern version of rail. But instead of distances it will cover the area.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#220

Post by windexh8er »

handoflixue wrote: post #175
crystal_revenge wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You really owe it to yourself to try them out. I've worked at multiple AI startups in lead AI Engineering roles, both working on deploying user facing LLM products and working on the research end of LLMs. I've done collaborative projects and demos with a pretty wide range of big names in this space (but don't want to doxx myself too aggressively), have had my LLM work cited on HN multiple times, have LLM based gith…

Seriously, all that familiarity and you think an LLM "literally" can't invent anything that didn't already exist? Like, I'm sorry, but you're just flat-out wrong and I've got the proof sitting on my hard drive. I use this supposedly impossible program daily.

Do you also think LLMs "think"?

From what you've described an LLM has not invented anything. LLMs that can reason have a bit more slight of hand but they're not coming up with new ideas outside of the bounds of what a lot of words have encompassed in both fiction and non.

Good for you that you've got a fun token of code that's what you've always wanted, I guess. But this type of fantasy take on LLMs seems to be more and more prevalent as of late. A lot of people defending LLMs as if they're owed something because they've built something or maybe people are getting more and more attached to them from the conversational angle. I'm not sure, but I've run across more people in 2025 that are way too far in the deep end of personifying their relationships with LLMs.

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