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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#451

Post by belter »

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…

>> But it is hard to argue against the value of current AI, which many of the vocal critics on HN seems to have the opinion of.

What is the concrete business case? Can anyone point to a revenue producing company using AI in production, and where AI is a material driver of profits?

Tool vendors don’t count. I’m not interested in how much money is being made selling shovels...show me a miner who actually struck gold please.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#452

Post by senordevnyc »

nstart wrote: post #161
syndacks wrote: post #89

I can’t get over the range of sentiment on LLMs. HN leans snake oil, X leans “we’re all cooked” —- can it possibly be both? How do other folks make sense of this? I’m not asking for a side, rather understanding the range. Does the range lead you to believe X over Y?

The problem with X is that so many people who have no verifiable expertise are super loud in shouting "$INDUSTRY is cooked!!" every time a new model releases. It's exhausting and untrue. The kind of video generation we see might nail realism but if you want to use it to create something meaningful which involves solving a ton of problems and making difficult choices in order to express an idea, you run into the walls…

I’d put more faith in HN’s proclamations if it hadn’t widely been wrong about AI in 2023, 2024, and now 2025. Watching the tone shift here has been fascinating. As the saying goes, the only thing moving faster than AI advances right now is the speed at which HN haters move the goalposts…

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#453

Post by senordevnyc »

syndacks wrote: post #89

I can’t get over the range of sentiment on LLMs. HN leans snake oil, X leans “we’re all cooked” —- can it possibly be both? How do other folks make sense of this? I’m not asking for a side, rather understanding the range. Does the range lead you to believe X over Y?

Because it turns out that HN is mostly made up of cranky middle-aged conservatives (small c) who have largely defined themselves around coding, and AI is an existential threat to their core identity.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#454

Post by CamperBob2 »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #56
dmd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People denied that bicycles could possibly balance even as others happily pedaled by. This is the same thing.

It’s possible this is correct. It’s also possible that people more experienced, knowledgable and skilled than you can see fundamental flaws in using LLMs for software engineering that you cannot. I am not including myself in that category. I’m personally honestly undecided. I’ve been coding for over 30 years and know something like 25 languages. I’ve taught programming to postgrad level, and built prototype AI system…

But right now these tools don’t work well. Great for vibe coding, prototyping, analysis, review, bouncing ideas.

What are some of the models you've been working with?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#455

Post by meindnoch »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #412
windexh8er wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 years ago a typical argument against AGI was that computers would never be able to think because "real thinking" involved mastery of language which was something clearly beyond what computers would ever be able to do. Mastery of words is thinking? In that line of argument then computers have been able to think for decades. Humans don't think only in words. Our context, memory and thoughts are processed and occur…

Mastery of words is thinking? That's the crazy thing. Yes, in fact, it turns out that language encodes and embodies reasoning. All you have to do is pile up enough of it in a high-dimensional space, use gradient descent to model its original structure, and add some feedback in the form of RL. At that point, reasoning is just a database problem, which we currently attack with attention. No one had the faintest clue. E…

So people without language cannot reason? I don't think so.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#456

Post by pjc50 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #362
pjc50 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing a trillion dollars for a revenue of a billion dollars doesn't sound great yet.

Indeed, its the old Uber playbook at nearly two extra orders of magnitude. It is a large enough number to simply run out of private capital to consume before it turns cash flow positive. Lots of things sell well if sold at such a loss. I’d take a new Ferrari for $2500 if it was on offer.

Did Uber actually do a lot of capital investment? They don't own the cars, for example.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#457

Post by andai »

andai wrote: post #273

Re: 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…

Re: yolo mode

https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=1ef97add6ba9404b900929ee195...

My notes from back when I set this up! Includes instructions for using a GUI file explorer as the agent user. As well as setting up a systemd service to fix the permissions automatically.

(And a nice trick which shows you which GUI apps are running as which user...)

However, most of these are just workarounds for the permission issue I kept running into, which is that Claude Code would for some reason create files with incorrect permissions so that I couldn't read or write those files from my normal account.

If someone knows how to fix that, or if someone at Anthropic is reading, then most of this Rube Goldberg machine becomes unnecessary :)

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#458

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #154
waldrews wrote: post #3

Remember, back in the day, when a year of progress was like, oh, they voted to add some syntactic sugar to Java...

That must have been a long time back. Having lived through the time when web pages were served through CGI and mobile phones only existed in movies, when SVMs where the new hotness in ML and people would write about how weird NNs were, I feel like I've seen a lot more concrete progress in the last few decades than this year. This year honestly feels quite stagnant. LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduc…

> LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past.

That's incorrect on many levels. They are drawing upon, and reproducing, language patterns from "the past", but they are combining those patterns in ways that may have never have been seen before. They may not be truly creative, but they are still capable of generating novel outputs.

> They're cool, but they were way cooler 4 years ago.

Maybe this year has been more about incremental progress with LLMs than the shock/coolness factor of talking to an LLM for the first time, but the utility of them, especially for programming, has dramatically increased this year, really in the last 6 months.

The improvement in "AI" image and video generation has also been impressive, to the point now that fake videos on YouTube can often only be identified as such by common sense rather that the fact that they don't look real.

Incremental improvement can often be more impressive that innovation, whose future importance can be hard to judge when it first appears. How many people read "Attention is all you need" in 2017 and thought "Wow! This is going to change the world!". Not even the authors of the paper thought that.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#459

Post by jliptzin »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #446
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…

It's a great tool, but right now it's only being used to feed the greed. >> Again, I guess no one knew AI would be as big as it is today, and it is only just started. People have been saying similar about self driving cars for years now. "AI" is another one of those expensive ideas that we'll get 85% of the way there and then to get the other 15% will be way more expensive than anyone will want to pay for. It's alrea…

There are some things it's really great at. For example, handling a css layout. If we have to spend trillions of dollars and get nothing else out of it other than being able to vertically center a without wrestling with css and wanting to smash the keyboard in the process, it will all have been worth it.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#460

Post by netdur »

mrheosuper wrote: post #267

I'm not against AI/LLM(in fact, i am quite supportive to it). But one of my biggest fear is overusing AI. We may introduce some tool that only "AI/LLM" can resonably do(Like tool with weird, convoluted UI/UX, syntax) and no one against it because AI/LLM can use/interact. Then genAI, It's become more and more difficult to tell which is AI and which is not, and AI is in everywhere. I dont know what to think about it. "…

i think the concern about software shifting toward ai design ignores that the web hasn't been human-first for a long time. most traffic is already machine to machine, like crawlers and ci pipelines. we’ve tolerated systems that are barely legible for years. anyone who has grepped through android studio logs knows that human readability is usually a tertiary goal at best. ai interacting with complex systems is just an evolution of the glue code we’ve always written.

as for who made it, utility usually matters more than where it came from. i used an agent for an oss changelog recently and it picked up things i’d forgotten while structuring the narrative better than i could. the intent and code were mine, but the ai acted as a high fidelity compressor. the risk isn't ai being everywhere. it’s the atrophy of judgment where we stop using it to support decisions and start using it to outsource thinking.

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