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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#321

Post by magicalhippo »

simonw wrote: post #130
probably_wrong wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself: because if the hype were to be believed we should have no relational databases when there's MongoDB, no need for dollars when there's cryptocoins, all virtual goods would be exclusively sold as NFTs, and we would be all driving self-driving cars by now. LLMs are being driven mostly by grifters trying to achieve a monopoly before they run out of cash. Under those conditions I find their promises h…

The way I've been handling the deafening hype is to focus exclusively on what the models that we have right now can do. You'll note I don't mention AGI or future model releases in my annual roundup at all. The closest I get to that is expressing doubt that the METR chart will continue at the same rate. If you focus exclusively on what actually works the LLM space is a whole lot more interesting and less frustrating.

> focus exclusively on what the models that we have right now can do

I'm just a casual user, but I've been doing the same and have noticed the sharp improvements of the models we have now vs a year ago. I have OpenAI Business subscription through work, I signed up for Gemini at home after Gemini 3, and I run local models on my GPU.

I just ask them various questions where I know the answer well, or I can easily verify. Rewrite some code, factual stuff etc. I compare and contrast by asking the same question to different models.

AGI? Hell no. Very useful for some things? Hell yes.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#322

Post by cherryteastain »

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]

Sam Altman [1] certainly seems to talk about AGI quite a bit

[1] https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#323

Post by spectralista »

scotty79 wrote: post #225
llmslave2 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best example is that even ATM machines didn't reduce bank teller jobs.

Why? Because even the bank teller is doing more than taking and depositing money.

IMO there is an ontological bias that pervades our modern society that confuses the map for the territory and has a highly distorted view of human existence through the lens of engineering.

We don't see anything in this time series, because this time series itself is meaningless nonsense that reflects exactly this special kind of ontological stupidity:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006092

As if the sum of human interaction in an economy is some kind of machine that we just need to engineer better parts for and then sum the outputs.

Any non-careerist, thinking person that studies economics would conclude we don't and will probably not have the tools to properly study this subject in our lifetimes. The high dimensional interaction of biology, entropy and time. We have nothing. The career economist is essentially forced to sing for their supper in a type of time series theater. Then there is the method acting of pretending to be surprised when some meaningless reductionist aspect of human interaction isn't reflected in the fake time series.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#324

Post by threethirtytwo »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #167
handoflixue wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

Over half of HN still thinks it’s a stochastic parrot and that it’s just a glorified google search.

The change hit us so fast a huge number of people don’t understand how capable it is yet.

Also it certainly doesn’t help that it still hallucinates. One mistake and it’s enough to set someone against LLMs. You really need to push through that hallucinations are just the weak part of the process to see the value.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#325

Post by threethirtytwo »

techpression wrote: post #261
zingar wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give us an idea of what you’re hoping for that is not possible to derive from training data of the entire internet and many (most?) published books?

This is the problem, the entire internet is a really bad set of training data because it’s extremely polluted. Also the derived argument doesn’t really hold, just because you know about two things doesn’t mean you’d be able to come up with the third, it’s actually very hard most of the time and requires you to not do next token prediction.

The emergent phenomenon is that the LLM can separate truth from fiction when you give it a massive amount of data. It can figure the world out just as we can figure it out when we are as well inundated with bullshit data. The pathways exist in the LLM but it won’t necessarily reveal that to you unless you tune it with RL.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#326

Post by baq »

techpression wrote: post #268
viraptor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on quite a few comments recently, it also looks like many have tried LLMs in the past, but haven't seriously revisited either the modern or more expensive models. And I get it. Not everyone wants to keep up to date every month, or burn cash on experiments. But at the same time, people seem to have opinions formed in 2024. (Especially if they talk about just hallucinations and broken code - tell the agent to sea…

Just last week Opus 4.5 decided that the way to fix a test was to change the code so that everything else but the test broke. When people say ”fix stuff” I always wonder if it actually means fix, or just make it look like it works (which is extremely common in software, LLM or not).

Nice. Did it realize the mistake and corrected it?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#327

Post by baq »

Gigachad wrote: post #125
Night_Thastus wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs hold some real utility. But that real utility is buried under a mountain of fake hype and over-promises to keep shareholder value high. LLMs have real limitations that aren't going away any time soon - not until we move to a new technology fundamentally different and separate from them - sharing almost nothing in common. There's a lot of 'progress-washing' going on where people claim that these shortfalls will m…

Pretty much. What actually exists is very impressive. But what was promised and marketed has not been delivered.

I find opus 4.5 and gpt 5.2 mind blowing more often than I find them dumb as rocks. I don’t listen to or read any marketing material, I just use the tools. I couldn’t care less about what the promises are, what I have now available to me is fundamentally different from what I had in August and it changed completely how I work.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#328

Post by nl »

windexh8er wrote: post #221
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…

> 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.

What does "think" mean?

Why is that kind of thinking required to create novel works?

Randomness can create novelty.

Mistakes can be novel.

There are many ways to create novelty.

Also I think you might not know how LLMs are trained to code. Pre-training gives them some idea of the syntax etc but that only gets you to fancy autocomplete.

Modern LLMs are heavily trained using reinforcement data which is custom task the labs pay people to do (or by distilling another LLM which has had the process performed on it).

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#330

Post by tgv »

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.

The negatives outweigh the positives, if only because the positives are so small. A bunch of coders making their lives easier doesn't really matter, but pupils and students skipping education does. As a meme said: you had better start eating healthy, because your future doctor vibed his way through med school.
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