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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#311

Post by ACCount37 »

tstrimple wrote: post #295
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]

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if a system that's an LLM at its core can attain AGI. With nothing but incremental advances in architecture, scaffolding, training and raw scale.

Mostly the training. I put less and less weight on "LLMs are fundamentally flawed" and more and more of it on "you're training them wrong". Too many "fundamental limitations" of LLMs are ones you can move the needle on with better training alone.

The foundation of LLM is flexible and capable, and the list of "capabilities that are exclusive to human mind" is ever shrinking.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#312

Post by fullstackchris »

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…

I wrote an article complaining about the whole hype over a year ago:

https://chrisfrewin.medium.com/why-llms-will-never-be-agi-70...

Seems to be playing out that way.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#313

Post by fullstackchris »

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 just use a couple of custom MCP tools with the standard claude desktop app:

https://chrisfrew.in/blog/two-of-my-favorite-mcp-tools-i-use...

IMO this is the best balance of getting agentic work done while having immediate access to anything else you may need with your development process.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#314

Post by clawedcod »

Madmallard wrote: post #210
dang wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please stop posting dismissive, curmudgeonly comments? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

His comment is far better than the rampant astroturfing from stakeholders going on everywhere on this website that is being mitigated not at all whatsoever. There is a wealth of information present suggesting these things are so bad for everyone in so many ways.

These people love generated content (like, they'll actually read generated blog post word-for-word and not even be angry; they'll skip a personal email for its machine summary) and they can generate all the content they'd ever want. If they want to take over HN this isn't a battle we're going to win except with aggressive moderation, and we know who feeds the mods.

HN isn't a place for thinking people any more (a long time coming, but you could squint and pretend until recently). Happy new year and adios, thanks for the 100s of accounts dang. Double pinky swear I won't make another.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#315

Post by fullstackchris »

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.

This overly discussed thesis is already laughable - decent LLMs have been out for 3 years now and unemployment (using US as example) is up around 1% over the same time frame - and even attributing that small percentage change completely to AI is also laughable

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#316

Post by rgoulter »

cebert wrote: post #70
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.

Many people feel threatened by the rapid advancements in LLMs, fearing that their skills may become obsolete, and in turn act irrationally. To navigate this change effectively, we must keep open minds, keep adaptable, and embrace continuous learning.

Many comments discussing LLMs involve emotions, sure. :) Including, obviously, comments in favour of LLMs.

But most discussion I see is vague and without specificity and without nuance.

Recognising the shortcomings of LLMs makes comments praising LLMs that much more believable; and recognising the benefits of LLMs makes comments criticising LLMs more believable.

I'd completely believe anyone who says they've found the LLM very helpful at greenfield frontend tasks, and I'd believe someone who found the LLM unable to carry out subtle refactors on an old codebase in a language that's not Python or JavaScript.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#317

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

hapticmonkey wrote: post #224
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 wi…

Contrary to the case for the internet, there is a way out, however - if local, open-source LLMs get good. I really hope they do, because enshittification does seem unavoidable if we depend on commercial offerings.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#319

Post by ColinEberhardt »

rr808 wrote: post #302

What happened to Devin? 2024 it was a leading contender now it isn't even included in the big list of coding agents.

It’s still around, and tends to be adopted by big enterprises. It’s generally a decent product, but is facing a lot of equally powerful competition and is very expensive.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#320

Post by TeodorDyakov »

belmont_sup wrote: post #255
mgfist wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that requires adoption. Devs on hackernews are already the most up to date folks in the industry and even here adoption of LLMs is incredibly slow. And a lot of the adoption that does happen is still with older tech like ChatGPT or Cursor.

What’s the newer tech?

Claude Code With Opus 4.5
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