Between the people with invested and/conflicting interests, and the hordes of dogmatic zealots, I find discussions about AI to be the least productive or reliably informed on HN.
2025: The Year in LLMs
421–430 of 643 posts
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#422Between the people with invested and/conflicting interests, and the hordes of dogmatic zealots, I find discussions about AI to be the least productive or reliably informed on HN.
Honestly this thread was pretty disappointing. Many of the comments here could have been attached to any post about LLMs in the past year or so.
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> exponential progress First you need to define what it means. What's the metric? Otherwise it's very much something you can argue about.
> What's the metric? Language model capability at generating text output. The model progress this year has been a lot of: - “We added multimodal” - “We added a lot of non AI tooling” (ie agents) - “We put more compute into inference” (ie thinking mode) So yes, there is still rapid progress, but these ^ make it clear, at least to me, that next gen models are significantly harder to build. Simultaneously we see a disti…
> Language model capability at generating text output.
How would you put this on a graph?
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#424Earlier 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.
What are some specific links to the rampant astroturfing that you feel is going on on this website and which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46450296 is better than?
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lon…
Normally everyone who publicly declares they're done with this site, will never make a new account again, etc. etc., either has already made their next account or will do so shortly. HN, for all its eternal decline generating endless complaints, seems to be irresistible to this sort of complainer.
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#426Earlier 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.
The adoption is just so weird to me. I cannot for the life of me get LLM chatbot to work for me. Every time I try I get into an argument with the stupid thing. They are still wrong constantly, and when I'm wrong they won't correct me.
I have great faith in AI in e.g. medical equipment, or otherwise as something built in, working on a single problem in the background, but the chat interface is terrible.
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well the "solution" for that will be the GPU vendors focusing solely on B2B sales because it's more profitable, therefore keeping GPUs out of the hands of average consumers. There's leaks suggesting that nVidia will gradually hike the prices of their 5090 cards from $2000 to $5000 due to RAM price increases ( https://wccftech.com/geforce-rtx-5090-prices-to-soar-to-5000... ). At that point, why even bother with the R&D for newer consumer cards when you know that barely anyone will be able to afford them?
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#428Re: yolo mode I looked into docker and then realized the problem I'm actually trying to solve was solved in like 1970 with users and permissions. I just made a agent user limited to its own home folder, and added my user to its group. Then I run Claude code etc as the agent user. So it can only read write /home/agent, and it cannot read or write my files. I add myself to agent group so I can read/write the agent file…
I really like this idea and just tried some steps for myself.
create user with homedir: sudo useradd -m agent
add myself to agent group: sudo usermod -a -G agent $USER
Allow agent group to agent home dir: sudo chmod -R 770 /home/agent
Start a new shell with the group (or login/logoff): newgrp agent Now you should be able to change into the agent home.
Allow your user to sudo as agent: echo "$USER ALL=(agent) NOPASSWD: ALL" |sudo tee -a /etc/sudoers.d/$USER-as-agent now you can start your agent using sudo: sudo -u agent your_agent
works nice.
Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. Simon is one of the main reasons I’ve been able to (sort of) keep up with developments in AI. I look forward to learning from his blog posts and HN comments in the year ahead, too.
Don't forget you can pay Simon to keep up with less! > At the end of every month I send out a much shorter newsletter to anyone who sponsors me for $10 or more on GitHub https://simonwillison.net/about/#monthly
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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that the "content" that reaches the top is always about AI / LLMs and nothing else and it is "all the time". Any opportunity to comment, he will link back to his own blog. He even reposted the same link (which is about AI) with one of his posts when the upvotes fell off and until the second one reached the top, with the intention of promoting his own blog. Let me simply prove my point to you on how predictable…
"He even reposted the same link (which is about AI) with one of his posts when the upvotes fell off" Where did I do that? > He will do a blog post this month about this paper [0] That paper you linked to is a perfect example of where my approach can add value! Did you read it? Do you understand what it saying? It is dense . I would love to read an evaluation of that paper by someone who can rephrase the core ideas an…
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