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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#221

Post by windexh8er »

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…

> They are helping their users create things that didn't exist before.

That is a derived output. That isn't new as in: novel. It may be unique but it is derived from training data. LLMs legitimately cannot think and thus they cannot create in that way.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#222

Post by scotty79 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #120
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 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…

> but we’re very clearly seeing sigmoid progress.

Yeah, probably. But no chart actually shows it yet. For now we are firmly in exponential zone of the signoid curve and can't really tell if it's going to end in a year, decade or a century.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#223

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#224

Post by hapticmonkey »

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.

It’s not the technology I’m dismissive about. It’s the economics.

25 years ago I was optimistic about the internet, web sites, video streaming, online social systems. All of that. Look at what we have now. It was a fun ride until it all ended up “enshitified”. And it will happen to LLMs, too. Fool me once.

Some developer tools might survive in a useful state on subscriptions. But soon enough the whole A.I. economy will centralise into 2 or 3 major players extracting more and more revenue over time until everyone is sick of them. In fact, this process seems to be happening at a pretty high speed.

Once the users are captured, they’ll orient the ad-spend market around themselves. And then they’ll start taking advantage of the advertisers.

I really hope it doesn’t turn out this way. But it’s hard to be optimistic.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#225

Post by scotty79 »

llmslave2 wrote: post #144
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How long before introduction of computers lead to increases in average productivity? How long for the internet? Business is just slow to figure out how to use anything for its benefit, but it eventually gets there.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#226

Post by scotty79 »

Madmallard wrote: post #202
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 :)

LLMs a year ago were more able to do a complex project I've repeatedly tried to do than they are now.

Try Antigravity with Gemini 3 Pro. Seems very capable to me.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#227

Post by Greduan »

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…

Text editors in a thousand flavours has indeed already been programmed though. I don't think you understood what op meant.

Curious, does it perform at the limit of the hardware? Was it programmed in a tools language (like C++, Rust, C, etc.) or in a web tech?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#228

Post by ksec »

All these improvement in a single year, 2025. While this may seem obvious to those who follows along the AI / LLM news. It may be worth pointing out again ChatGPT was introduced to us in November 2022.

I still dont believe AGI, ASI or Whatever AI will take over human in short period of time say 10 - 20 years. But it is hard to argue against the value of current AI, which many of the vocal critics on HN seems to have the opinion of. People are willing to pay $200 per month, and it is getting $1B dollar runway already.

Being more of a Hardware person, the most interesting part to me is the funding of all the developments of latest hardware. I know this is another topic HN hate because of the DRAM and NAND pricing issue. But it is exciting to see this from a long term view where the pricing are short term pain. Right now the industry is asking, we have together over a trillion dollar to spend on Capex over the next few years and will even borrow more if it needs to be, when can you ship us 16A / 14A / 10A and 8A or 5A, LPDDR6, Higher Capacity DRAM at lower power usage, better packaging, higher speed PCIe or a jump to optical interconnect? Every single part of the hardware stack are being fused with money and demand. The last time we have this was Post-PC / Smartphone era which drove the hardware industry forward for 10 - 15 years. The current AI can at least push hardware for another 5 - 6 years while pulling forward tech that was initially 8 - 10 years away.

I so wished I brought some Nvidia stock. Again, I guess no one knew AI would be as big as it is today, and it is only just started.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#229

Post by semilin »

asielen wrote: post #137
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.

It is an over correction because of all the empty promises of LLMs. I use Claude and chatgpt daily at work and am amazed at what they can do and how far they can come. BUT when I hear my executive team talk and see demos of "Agentforce" and every saas company becoming an AI company promising the world, I have to roll my eyes. The challenge I have with LLMs is they are great at creating first draft shiny objects and t…

This seems like the right take. The claims of the imminence of AGI are exhausting and to me appear dissonant with reality. I've tried gemini-cli and Claude Code and while they're both genuinely quite impressive, they absolutely suffer from a kind of prototype syndrome. While I could learn to use these tools effectively for large-scale projects, I still at present feel more comfortable writing such things by hand.

The NVIDIA CEO says people should stop learning to code. Now if LLMs will really end up as reliable as compilers, such that they can write code that's better and faster than I can 99% of the time, then he might be right. As things stand now, that reality seems far-fetched. To claim that they're useless because this reality has not yet been achieved would be silly, but not more silly than claiming programming is a dead art.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#230

Post by signatoremo »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #182
CamperBob2 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the confusion is people's misunderstanding of what 'new code' and 'new imagery' mean. Yes, LLMs can generate a specific CRUD webapp that hasn't existed before but only based on interpolating between the history of existing CRUD webapps. I mean traditional Markov Chains can also produce 'new' text in the sense that "this exact text" hasn't been seen before, but nobody would argue that traditional Markov Chains…

Lot of impressive points. They are also irrelevant. The majority of people also only extrapolate from the knowledge they acquired in the past. That’s why there is the concept of inventor, someone who comes up with new ideas. Many new inventions are also based on existing ideas. Is that the reason to dismiss those achievements?

Do you only take LLM seriously if it can be another Einstein?

> But a world where we used LLMs for the majority of work, would be a world with no fundamental breakthroughs.

What do you consider recent fundamental breakthroughs?

Even if you are right, human can continue to work on hard problems while letting LLM handle the majority of derivative work

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