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Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

antirez.com

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Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#331

Post by phlummox »

> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say.

But did any AI researchers actually claim there was no representation of meaning? I thought generally, the criticism of LLMs was that while they do abstract from their corpus - ie, you can regard them as having a representation of "meaning" - it's tightly and inextricably tied to the surface level representation, it isn't grounded in models of the external world, and LLMs have poor ability to transfer that knowledge to other surface encodings.

I don't know who the "certain AI researchers" are supposed to be. But the "stochastic parrot" paper by Bender et al [1] says:

> Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind.

That's a very different objection to the one antirez describes - I think he's erecting a straw man. But I'd be happy to be corrected by anyone more familiar with the research.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#332

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Aurornis wrote: post #120
bachmeier wrote: post #99

> Programmers resistance to AI assisted programming has lowered considerably. Even if LLMs make mistakes, the ability of LLMs to deliver useful code and hints improved to the point most skeptics started to use LLMs anyway: now the return on the investment is acceptable for many more folks. I'm not a fan of this phrasing. Use of the terms "resistance" and "skeptics" implies they were wrong. It's important we don't eng…

> The change occurred because LLMs are useful for programming in 2025 But the skeptics and anti-AI commenters are almost as active as ever, even as we enter 2026. The debate about the usefulness of LLMs has grown into almost another culture war topic. I still see a constant stream of anti-AI comments on HN and every other social platform from people who believe the tools are useless, the output is always unusable, pe…

"Useful for programming" is a massive and dishonest bait and switch.

Lots of things are "useful for programming". Switching to a comfier chair is more useful for programming than any LLM.

We were sold vibe coding, and that's what managers want.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#333

Post by anthk »

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.

The author loves TCL. On prototyping, TCL/Tk it's a godsend.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#334

Post by antirez »

phlummox wrote: post #331

> For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation about what they were going to say. But did any AI researchers actually claim there was no representation of meaning? I thought generally, the…

> Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent

This means exactly that no representation should exist in the activation states about what the model wants to tell, and there must be only a single token probabilistic inference at play.

Also their model requires the contrary, too: that the model does not know, semantically, what the query really means.

Stochastic Parrot has a scientific meaning, and just only observing the function of the models, it is quite evident that they were very wrong, but now we have stong evidence (via probing) that also the sentence you quoted is not correct, since the model knows the idea to express also in general terms, and features about things it is going to say much later activates a lot of tokens earlier, including conceptual features that are relevant later in the sentence / concept expressed.

You are doing the big error that is common to do in this context of extending the stochastic parrot to a non scientifically isolated model that can be made large enough to accomodate any evidence arriving from new generations of models. The stochastic parrot does not understand the query nor is trying to reply to you in any way, it just exploits a probabilistic link among the context window and the next word. This link can be more complex than a Markov chain but must be of the same kind: lacking understanding whatsoever and communication intent (no representation of the concept / sentences that are required to reply correctly). How it is possible to believe in this, today? And, check yourself what the top AI scientists today believe about the correctness of the stochastic parrot hypothesis.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#336

Post by georgefrowny »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #328
georgefrowny wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much more important also is that LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests. When the appreciable-fraction-of-GDP money tap turns off, there going to be enormous pressure to start putting a finger on the scale here. And AI spew is theoretically a fantastic place to insert almost subliminal contextual adverts on a way that traditional advertising can only dream about. I…

> When the appreciable-fraction-of-GDP money tap turns off, there going to be enormous pressure to start putting a finger on the scale here. Yeah, back in the day before monetization Internet pages were informative, reliable and ad-free too.

One difference is that the early internet was heavily composed of enthusiastic individuals. AI is almost entirely corporate and money-focused.

Even most hobby AI projects mostly seem to have an eye on being a side hustle or CV buffing.

Perhaps it's because even in the 90s you could serve a website for basically free (once you had the server). AI today has a noticeable per-user cost.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#337

Post by andrepd »

andrepd wrote: post #266
laterium wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue you're overlooking is the scarcity of experts. You're comparing the current situation to an alternative universe where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response. That is not the reality we're living in. Doctors barely give you 5 minutes even if you get an appointment days or weeks in advance. There is just nobody to ask. The alternatives today are 1)…

Two MAJOR issues with your argument. > where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response. Why in god's name would you need to ask a doctor 10 questions every day? How is this in any way germane to this issue? In any first-world country you can get a GP appointment free of charge either on the day or with a few days' wait, depending on the urgency. Not to mention…

I love that the next day, I open this post and it's simply downvoted with 0 counterpoint.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#338

Post by andrepd »

markdown wrote: post #280
andrepd wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two MAJOR issues with your argument. > where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response. Why in god's name would you need to ask a doctor 10 questions every day? How is this in any way germane to this issue? In any first-world country you can get a GP appointment free of charge either on the day or with a few days' wait, depending on the urgency. Not to mention…

> In any first-world country you can get a GP appointment free of charge Are you really under the assumption that this is a first-world perk?

You're right, it's also true in many middle-income countries, like Brazil.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#339

Post by cinntaile »

djdishsv wrote: post #97
cinntaile wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but quite a few claims in the article are about AI research. He does not have any qualifications there. If the focus was more on usefulness, that would be a different discussion and then his experience does add weight.

> smart, intelligent person gives opinion > woah buddy this persons opinion isn’t worth anything more than a random homeless person off the street. they’re not an expert in this field Is there a term for this kind of pedantry? Obviously we can put more weight behind the words a person says if they’ve proven themselves trustworthy in prior areas - and we should! We want all people to speak and let the best idea win. I…

Evaluate on merit indeed and that is not what is happening. The parent I replied to used an authoritative argument that is not based on (relevant) merit.

Re: Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

#340

Post by Libidinalecon »

mjr00 wrote: post #151
nl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some limited truth in this but we still see claims that LLMs are "just next token predictors" and "just regurgitate code they read online". These are just uninformed and wrong views. It's fair to say that these people were (are!) wrong.

> we still see claims that LLMs are "just next token predictors" and "just regurgitate code they read online". These are just uninformed and wrong views. It's fair to say that these people were (are!) wrong. I don't think it's fair to say that at all. How are LLMs not statistical models that predict tokens? It's a big oversimplification but it doesn't seem wrong , the same way that "computers are electricity running…

It is just a tell that the person believes LLMs are more than what they are ontologically.

No one says "computers are JUST electricity running through circuits" because no one tries to argue the computer itself is "thinking" or has some kind of being. No one tries to argue that when you put the computer to sleep it is actually doing a form of "sleeping".

The mighty token though produces all kinds of confused nonsense.

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