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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

381–390 of 643 posts

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#381
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 feels like there are several conversations happening that sound the same but are actually quite different.

One of them is whether or not large models are useful and/or becoming more useful over time. (To me, clearly the answer is yes)

The other is whether or not they live up to the hype. (To me, clearly the answer is no)

There are other skirmishes around capability for novelty, their role in the economy, their impact on human cognition, if/when AGI might happen and the overall impact to the largely tech-oriented community on HN.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#382
post #256
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…

These are not all improvements. Listed: * The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance * The year that Llama lost its way * The year of alarmingly AI-enabled browsers * The year of the lethal trifecta * The year of slop * The year that data centers got extremely unpopular

Said differently - the year we start to see all of the externalities of a globally scaled hyped tech trend.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

They seem to be missing a bit on learning as you go and thinking about things and getting new insights.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

That depends on how you define AGI - it's a meaningless term to use since everyone uses it to mean different things. What exactly do you mean ?!

Yes, there is a lot that can be improved via different training, but at what point is it no longer a language model (i.e. something that auto-regressively predicts language continuations)?

I like to use an analogy to the children's "Stone Soup" story whereby a "stone soup" (starting off as a stone in a pot of boiling water) gets transformed into a tasty soup/stew by strangers incrementally adding extra ingredients to "improve the flavor" - first a carrot, then a bit of beef, etc. At what point do you accept that the resulting tasty soup is not in fact stone soup?! It's like taking an auto-regressively SGD-trained Transformer, and incrementally tweaking the architecture, training algorithm, training objective, etc, etc. At some point it becomes a bit perverse to choose to still call it a language model

Some of the "it's just training" changes that would be needed to make today's LLMs more brain-like may be things like changing the training objective completely from auto-regressive to predicting external events (with the goal of having it be able to learn the outcomes of it's own actions, in order to be able to plan them), which to be useful would require the "LLM" to then be autonomous and act in some (real/virtual) world in order to learn.

Another "it's just training" change would be to replace pre/mid/post-training with continual/incremental runtime learning to again make the model more brain-like and able to learn from it's own autonomous exploration of behavior/action and environment. This is a far more profound, and ambitious, change than just fudging incremental knowledge acquisition for some semblance of "on the job" learning (which is what the AI companies are currently working on).

If you put these two "it's just training/learning" enhancements together then you've now got something much more animal/human-like, and much more capable than an LLM, but it's already far from a language model - something that passively predicts next word every time you push the "generate next word" button. This would now be an autonomous agent, learning how to act and control/exploit the world around it. The whole pre-trained, same-for-everyone, model running in the cloud, would then be radically different - every model instance is then more like an individual learning based on it's own experience, and maybe you're now paying for compute for the continual learning compute rather than just "LLM tokens generated".

These are "just" training (and deployment!) changes, but to more closely approach human capability (but again, what to you mean by "AGI"?) there would also need to be architectural changes and additions to the "Transformer" architecture (add looping, internal memory, etc), depending on exactly how close you want to get to human/animal capability.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#385

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…

I think the confusion is people's misunderstanding of what 'new code' and 'new imagery' mean. Yes, LLMs can generate a specific CRUD webapp that hasn't existed before but only based on interpolating between the history of existing CRUD webapps. I mean traditional Markov Chains can also produce 'new' text in the sense that "this exact text" hasn't been seen before, but nobody would argue that traditional Markov Chains…

as architectures evolve, i think it can be that we learn more "side effects".. back in 2020 openai researchers said "GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning" the model emerges at a certain level of scale...

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#386
post #346

Let's hope 2026 will also have interesting innovations not related to AI or LLMs.

2025 had plenty of those, they just didn't get as many news headlines.

One of the difficult things of modernity is that it's easy to confuse what you hear about a lot with what is real.

One of the great things about modernity is that progress continues, whether we know about it or not.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#387

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…

I think the confusion is people's misunderstanding of what 'new code' and 'new imagery' mean. Yes, LLMs can generate a specific CRUD webapp that hasn't existed before but only based on interpolating between the history of existing CRUD webapps. I mean traditional Markov Chains can also produce 'new' text in the sense that "this exact text" hasn't been seen before, but nobody would argue that traditional Markov Chains…

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#388
post #101

Speaking of new year and AI: my phone just suggested "Happy Birthday!" as the quick-reply to any "Happy New Year!" notification I got in the last hours. I'm not too worried about my job just yet.

It won't help to point out the worst examples. You're not competing with an outdated Apple LLM running on a phone. You're competing with Anthropic frontier models running on a multimillion dollar rack of servers.

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you also think LLMs "think"? From what you've described an LLM has not invented anything. LLMs that can reason have a bit more slight of hand but they're not coming up with new ideas outside of the bounds of what a lot of words have encompassed in both fiction and non. Good for you that you've got a fun token of code that's what you've always wanted, I guess. But this type of fantasy take on LLMs seems to be more…

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"?

You seem to be pretty far down the rabbit hole. How about this... You task an LLM to create a photon torpedo. If it can truly think then it should be able to provide you with something tangible. When you've got that in hand let us all know.

Back to the land of reality... Describing something in fiction doesn’t magically make it "not an invention". Fiction can anticipate an idea, but invention is about producing a working, testable implementation and usually involves novel technical methods. "Star Trek did it" is at most prior art for the concept, not a blueprint for the mechanism. If you can't understand that differential then maybe go ask an LLM.

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