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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#291

Post by brabel »

staticassertion wrote: post #104
snigsnog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI. The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too d…

> Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI. I know a lot of "normal" people who have completely replaced their search engine with AI. It's increasingly a staple for people. Smartphones were absolutely NOT immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person, that's total revisionist history. I rememb…

I agree with most points but as a tech enthusiast, I was using a smart phone years before the iPhone, and I could already use the internet, make video calls, email etc around 2005. It was a small flip phone but it was not uncommon for phones to do that already at that time, at least in Australia and parts of Asia (a Singaporean friend told me about the phone).

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#292

Post by 9dev »

ori_b wrote: post #35
websiteapi wrote: post #24

I'm curious how all of the progress will be seen if it does indeed result in mass unemployment (but not eradication) of professional software engineers.

My prediction: If we can successfully get rid of most software engineers, we can get rid of most knowledge work. Given the state of robotics, manual labor is likely to outlive intellectual labor.

That’s the deep irony of technology IMHO, that innovation follows Conway's law on a meta layer: White collar workers inevitably shaped high technology after themselves, and instead of finally ridding humanity of hard physical labour—as was the promise of the Industrial Revolution—we imitate artists, scientists, and knowledge workers.

We can now use natural language to instruct computers generate stock photos and illustrations that would take a professional artist a few years ago, discover new molecule shapes, beat the best Go players, build the code for entire applications, or write documents of various shapes and lengths—but painting a wall? An unsurmountable task that requires a human to execute reliably, not even talking about economics.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#293

Post by Flow »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #232
ksec wrote: post #228

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…

Seems like Nvidia will be focusing on the super beefy GPUs and leaving the consumer market to a smaller player

I don't get why Nvidia can't do both? Is it because of the limited production capabilities of the factories?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#294

Post by jes5199 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #187

Speaking of asynchronous agents, what do people use? Claude Code for web is extremely limited, because you have no custom tools. Claude Code in GitHub Actions is vastly more useful, due to the custom environment, but ackward to use interactively. Are there any good alternatives?

I'm running Claude Code in a tmux on a VPS, and I'm working on setting up a meta-agent who can talk to me over text messages

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#295

Post by tstrimple »

ksec wrote: post #228

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…

[flagged]

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#296

Post by brabel »

simonw wrote: post #180
MitziMoto wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MCP isn't going anywhere. Some developers can't seem to see past their terminal or dev environment when it comes to MCP. Skills, etc do not replace MCP and MCP is far more than just documentation searching. MCP is a great way for an LLM to connect to an external system in a standardized way and immediately understand what tools it has available, when and how to use them, what their inputs and outputs are,etc. For exa…

Yeah, I don't think I was particularly clear in that section. I don't think MCP is going to go away, but I do think it's unlikely to ever achieve the level of excitement it had in early 2025 again. If you're not building inside a code execution environment it's a very good option for plugging tools into LLMs, especially across different systems that support the same standard. But code execution environments are so mu…

I disagree. MCP will remain the best way to do most things for the same reason REST APIs are the main way to access non local services: they provide a way to secure and audit access to systems in a way that a coding environment cannot. And you can authorize actions depending on the well defined inputs and outputs. You can’t do that using just a bash script unless said script actually does SSO and calls REST APIs but then you just have a worse MCP client without any interoperability.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#297

Post by ben_w »

phatfish wrote: post #280
Kerrick wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on, you're now saying that if something has ever been described in fiction it doesn't count as invention? So if somebody literally developed a working photon torpedo, that isn't new because "Star Trek Did It"?

Is there any danger an LLM is going to create a working photo torpedo?

Well, they can use tools, and tools includes physics simulations, so if it is possible (and FWIW the tool-free "intuition" of ChatGPT is "there will never be an age of antimatter"), then why couldn't LLMs grind those tools to get a solution?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#298

Post by danielbln »

nen-nomad wrote: post #118
snigsnog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI. The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too d…

ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.

Even my mom and aunts are using it frequently for all sorts of things, and it took a long time for them to hop onto internet and smartphones at first.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#299

Post by fullstackchris »

> The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents. It appears that the best possible tool for any situation is Bash—if your agent can run arbitrary shell commands, it can do anything that can be done by typing commands into a terminal.

I push back strongly from this. In the case of the solo, one-machine coder, this is likely the case - if you're exposing workflows or fixed tools to customers / collegues / the web at large via API or similar, then MCP is still the best way to expose it IMO.

Think about a GitHub or Jira MCP server - commandline alone they are sure to make mistakes with REST requests, API schema etc. With MCP the proper known commands are already baked in. Remember always that LLMs will be better with natural language than code.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#300

Post by kingstnap »

legulere wrote: post #272
websiteapi wrote: post #24

I'm curious how all of the progress will be seen if it does indeed result in mass unemployment (but not eradication) of professional software engineers.

Even if it will make software engineering drastically more productive, it’s questionable that this will lead to unemployment. Efficiency gains translate to lower prices. Sometimes this leads to very few additional demand, as can be seen with masses of typesetters that lost their jobs. Sometimes this leads to a dramatically higher demand like you can see in the classic Jevons paradox examples of coal and light bulbs.…

Software demand is philosophically limited by the question of "What can your computer do for you?"

You can describe that somewhat formally as:

{What your computer can do} intersect {What you want done (consciously or otherwise)}

Well a computer can technically calculate any computuable task that fits in bounded memory, that is an enormous set so its real limitations are its interfaces. In which case it can send packets, make noises, and display images.

How many human desires are things that can be solved with making noises, displaying images, and sending packets? Turns out quite a few but its not everything.

Basically I'm saying we should hope more sorts of physical interfaces come around (like VR and Robotics) so we cover more human desires. Robotics is a really general physical interface (like how ip packets are an extremely general interface) so its pretty promising if it pans out.

Personally, I find it very hard to even articulate what desires I have. I have this feeling that I might be substantially happier if I was just sitting around a campfire eating food and chatting with people instead of enjoying whatever infinite stuff a super intelligent computer and robots could do for me. At least some of the time.

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