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Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

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Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#241

Post by layer8 »

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?

> What do you all do?

Google for non-AI sources. Ask several models to get a wider range of opinions. Apply one’s own reasoning capabilities where applicable. Remain skeptical in the absence of substantive evidence.

Basically, do what you did before LLMs existed, and treat LLM output like you would have a random anonymous blog post you found.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#242

Post by zdragnar »

zamadatix wrote: post #174
etra0 wrote: post #127

LLMs have certainly become extremely useful for Software Engineers, they're very convincing (and pleasers, too) and I'm still unsure about the future of our day-to-day job. But one thing that has scared me the most, is the trust of LLMs output to the general society. I believe that for software engineers it's really easy to see if it's being useful or not -- We can just run the code and see if the output is what we e…

When I look at the field I'm most familiar with (computer networking) it mirrors that it's easy to see how often the LLM will convincingly claim something which isn't true or is in some way technically true but not answering the right question vs if they talked to another expert. The reality to compare to though is not that people really get in contact with true networking experts often (though I'm sure it feels like…

This justification comes up when discussing therapy too.

To take it to an extreme, it's basically saying "people already get little or bad advice, we might as well give them some more bad advice."

I simply don't buy it.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#243

Post by akomtu »

mrdependable wrote: post #168

These comments are a bit scary. It feels like LLMs managed to exploit some fault in the human psyche. I think the biggest danger of this technology is that people are not mentally equipped to handle it.

The fault is well known: chatbots are bootlickers. They always praise users and never criticize them, so chatbots are quickly promoted to the personal advisor position. The AI of Sauron of technological age.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#244

Post by Aurornis »

gldrk wrote: post #193
Aurornis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're an interesting phenomen that people have convinced themselves MUST BE USEFUL in the context of software development, Reading these comments during this period of history is interesting because a lot of us actually have found ways to make them useful, acknowledging that they’re not perfect. It’s surreal to read claims from people who insist we’re just deluding ourselves, despite seeing the results Yeah they’…

It's absolutely possible to be mistaken about this. The placebo effect is very strong. I'm sure there are countless things in my own workflow that feel like a huge boon to me while being a wash at best in reality. The classic keyboard vs. mouse study comes to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2657135 This is why it's so important to have data. So far I have not seen any evidence of a 'Cambrian explosion' or…

> So far I have not seen any evidence of a 'Cambrian explosion' or 'industrial revolution' in software.

The claim was that they’re useful at all, not that it’s a Cambrian explosion.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#245

Post by daveguy »

Hendrikto wrote: post #82
raddan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming your fact is true, that corn merely uses an order of magnitude or two more water than AI is surprising, given the utility of corn. It feeds the entire US (hundreds of millions of people), is used as animal feed (thus also feeding us), and is widely exported to feed other people. I the spirit of the “I think”s and “I believe”s of this blog post, I think that corn has a lot more utility than AI.

> It feeds the entire US (hundreds of millions of people), is used as animal feed (thus also feeding us), and is widely exported to feed other people. Not really. Most corn grown in the US isn’t even fit for consumption. It is primarily used for fermenting bioethanol.

Source?

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#246

Post by daveguy »

Jaxan wrote: post #197
dwaltrip wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide numbers relative to things many of us already do? - drive to the store or to work - take a shower - eat meat - fly on vacation And so on... thanks!

Of those things you mention, I only take showers (but not even everyday). But maybe I’m an outlier.

> drive to the store or to work

If you don't do that, and are a homesteader, then yes. You are a very small minority outlier. (Assuming you aren't ordering supplies delivered instead of driving to the store.

> Eat meat.

Yes, not eating meat is in the minority.

> Fly on vacation.

So, don't vacation, walk to vacation, or drive to vacation? 1/3 are also consumptive.

It seems you are either a very significant outlier, or you're being daft. I'm curious which. Would you mind clarifying?

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#247

Post by dxxmxnd »

andsoitis wrote: post #164
preisschild wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if they use lobotomized bots like Grok...

>> 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... What are you on about? For instance, asking Grok "are vaccines safe", it has a pretty good reply, starting with "Yes, vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and one of the most effective public health interventions in history. Extensive scientific evidence from decades of re…

Thank you. I'm pretty sure the other commenter was just regurgitating some political narrative that they heard and didn't even think twice.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#248

Post by jodrellblank »

skydhash wrote: post #180
candiddevmike wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skeptic here: I do think LLMs are a fad for software development . They're an interesting phenomen that people have convinced themselves MUST BE USEFUL in the context of software development, either through ignorance or a sense of desperation. I do not believe LLMs will be used long term for any kind of serious software development use cases, as the maintenance cost of the code they produce will run development teams…

Another skeptic here: I strongly believe that creating new software was always easy. The real struggle is maintaining it, especially for more than one or two years. To this day, I've not seen any arguments or even a hint on reflection on how we're going to maintain all these code that the LLMs is going to generate. Even for prototyping, using a wireframe software would be faster.

b) why wouldn't a future-LLM be able to maintain it? (i.e. you ask it to make a change to the program's behaviour, and it does).

a) why maintain instead of making it all disposable? This could be like a dishwasher asking who is going to wash all the mass-manufactured paper cups. Use future-LLM to write something new which does the new thing.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#249

Post by jodrellblank »

candiddevmike wrote: post #158
Aurornis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that doesn’t make you a skeptic in this context. The LLM skeptics claim LLM usefulness is an illusion. That the LLMs are a fad, and they produced more problems than they solve. They cite cherry picked announcements showing that LLM usage makes development slower or worse. They opened ChatGPT a couple times a few months ago, asked some questions, and then went “Aha! I knew it was bad!” when they encountered their…

Skeptic here: I do think LLMs are a fad for software development . They're an interesting phenomen that people have convinced themselves MUST BE USEFUL in the context of software development, either through ignorance or a sense of desperation. I do not believe LLMs will be used long term for any kind of serious software development use cases, as the maintenance cost of the code they produce will run development teams…

Here[1] is a recent submission from Simon Willison using GPT-5.2 to port a Python HTML-parsing library to JavaScript in 4.5 hours. The code passes the 9,200 test cases of html5lib-tests used by web browsers. That's a workable, usable, standards-compliant (as much as the test cases are) HTML parser in Almost no human could port 3000 lines of Python to JavaScript and test it in their spare time while watching TV and decorating a Christmas tree. Almost no human you can employ would do a good job of it for $6/hour and have it done 5 hours. How is that "ignorance or a sense of desparation" and "not actually useful"?

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

[2] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/justhtml/

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#250

Post by retinaros »

heliumtera wrote: post #205
preisschild wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if they use lobotomized bots like Grok...

What do you mean with lobotomized? Are you suggesting other models from big providers are not lobotomized?

this is actually the opposite. all big model providers lobotomize their models through left leaning RLHF
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