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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

#281

Post by floren »

Retric wrote: post #211
drdaeman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube. They are good enough to be entertaining even if they include random errors like messing up the main character’s name. The thing is the creative economy is all about people’s attention and pocketbooks, it doesn’t need to be great just good enough.

> My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube.

God, I'm sorry

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#282

Post by grey-area »

Retric wrote: post #211
drdaeman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube. They are good enough to be entertaining even if they include random errors like messing up the main character’s name. The thing is the creative economy is all about people’s attention and pocketbooks, it doesn’t need to be great just good enough.

Deeply troubling for so many reasons.

Please try to get her to stop.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#283

Post by grey-area »

aidos wrote: post #204
grey-area wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really troubling finance are relying on LLMs (word generators!) for financial analysis - I mean I guess it means there will never be any annoying gaps in the data.

Depends on how it’s done. I use it a lot now for knocking up grafana charts etc. It’s not so much that the LLM is feeding the numbers through. You can still use real tools to analyse and summarise the numbers, it’s just much quicker at driving them. As ever with data analysis, two things will continue to be true. Real insights come from spotting something that looks off and digging into it deeper. Secondly, it’s real…

Sure it depends how it is done but for most uses I'd say they are not appropriate - building tools with them is ok if you double check (though how many people will when the answers seem good enough at first?).

I'd find it really troubling if financial analysts are using them without knowing the deep limitations of the tooling (which the companies selling them will not highlight for you). They don't actually count or reason so they are liable to just make up figures based on their training dataset, not the data you give them.

Using them for actual financial analysis and generating reports based on data will lead to hallucinated figures which conform to what was asked for, not what the data says and silently fills in gaps in the data. It's extremely dangerous and not something they are good at at all.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#284

Post by pprotas »

kstenerud wrote: post #261
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to offend (it's AI coded anyway :)) but that does not scream "high quality" to me. The headline gif on that repo just paints a terrible picture. It can't draw a box correctly, there's random underscores all over the screen. The UI itself is just incredibly incoherent. I don't even know what I'm looking at. Like, no it doesn't seem like very high quality work... It just seems like a vibe coded tool. Edit:…

You do realize that you're complaining about the Claude Code TUI, right? That's not what this product is; merely a tool it uses.

You claim "very high quality" but can't even get the basic UI working properly. You wrap tmux and a container in 2k lines of code and claim quality, I think the comment above was aimed at this claim.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#285

Post by GistNoesis »

Last 6 months is humanity losing control of LLMs.

- Memory market cornering which mitigated the adoption of local AI despite great open model being released.

- Fast penetration of IP exfiltrating tools in companies world-wide.

- Developers producing more code that they can read.

- Autonomous agents killing Open Source by siphoning the attention economy

- Autonomous agents destroyed online communities (including HN)

- Autonomous agents being used in warfare (targeting, propaganda...)

- Widespread vulnerabilities discovered, Widespread supply chain attacks.

- Increasing inequality, fracture in perception, Green indicators, Grim realities.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#287

Post by nate8bit »

The tooling has become so good though - the eco-system around the LLM. The models have become really good, yes - but it's definitely slowed in my opinion. The tooling is what really has become great - "harness" is probably the best word. When folk like Elon/Schmidt/Theil/etc. talk about singularities and industrial revolutions - it sounds extremely out of touch - or actually protective of the massive capex they've potentially sunk.

EDIT: Schmidt's booed commencement speech was probably one of the most out-of-touch speeches (outside of a tech interview) I've heard.

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#288

Post by kstenerud »

wickedsight wrote: post #276
kstenerud wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. For example, I've had the opposite experience of yours, generating very high quality work using Claude (such as https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai ). Just in dealing with all the bugs and idiosyncrasies in the technologies I'm using, the agent has been a godsend in discovering and c…

> The polarization comes from the very disparate coding experiences and output quality that different people find when using these tools. Not just when using tools, also when using humans. The frame of reference of what is considered 'production code' differs immensely between organizations, teams and people. The code I get from LLM's is usually much better than what I get from my peers. Maybe not one shot, but after…

Absolutely! I find its test generation, properly steered, to be top notch. In many ways it's like having a second head, because it'll spontaneously come up with test paths that I'd normally only get to after a month or so in one of my "aha! What about XYZ?" shower thoughts.

You'll also notice that Linus doesn't poo-poo AI at all. His only gripe is with people using it wrong, such as flooding security lists with drive-by security reports after pointing their agent to the code and saying "find me some VULNS!!1!1!!"

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#289

Post by ankaz »

_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.

[dead]

Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

#290

Post by vessenes »

angled wrote: post #115
RobinL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?

My pipeline for this is vscode + prompts + markdown templates + GitHub copilot -> markdown docs -> pandoc to produce.docx -> copilot in word for “nice” formatting -> copilot in ppt for nice decks. LLMs all the way down. I find it’s easier to version control and diff the .md artefacts, those remain my authoritative source.

I was doing something like this, and then realized at least with claude that it’s so much better at HTML that it’s better to get an HTML-first deck together, which could then be turned into a PPT template and/or PDF directly, depending on needs.

It saved me a fair number of design-tweak steps in the md -> pandoc part of the workflow. Realistically, hand editing claude’s HTML is also easy in most cases, so I didn’t feel like I lost much (for the generative cases). Similarly if it’s mostly what I’ve written directly that’s the source it’ll be in markdown, and I’ve found it’s a faster path to have md -> (LLM-translated HTML deck) -> pdf.

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