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2025: The Year in LLMs

simonwillison.net

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Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#541

Post by jheez3 »

th0ma5 wrote: post #432
dang wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop.

I think when a moderator keeps intervening like this it really does mean that there's something wrong here. I think people would be less mad if you just went ahead and said that you have some kind of special arrangement here with this influencer and post publicly that you like them constantly spamming the site and letting their fans flood the place with deflection and appeals for donations to them. Even YouTube had t…

Agreed. The preferential treatment is blatant and obvious.

The fact that an old-timer like yourself comes forward and says it means that the newer people aren't nutters thinking it.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#542

Post by jheez3 »

simonw wrote: post #502
_zagj wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's my motivation? Are you really going to insult my and others' intelligence like this? Directly or indirectly, your motivation is money. You already offer monthly subscriptions to your blog, and you're clearly trying to build a monetizable brand for yourself as a leading authority on AI, especially as it pertains to software development.

If my motivation was money I would cash in on the reputation I've already built and go and land a Silicon Valley salaried job somewhere. Sponsorship from my monthly newsletter doesn't come close. Seriously, do you have any idea how much money I'm leaving on the table right now NOT having a real job in this space? Being a blogger is wildly financially irresponsible!

Lol this argument doesn't hold weight.

Do you really want to be an employee? Lets see what your reservation price is first.

Im pretty sure you'd need to be paid a lot to forgo having control over your time and so on. Lets keep it one-hunnid.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#543

Post by simonw »

jheez3 wrote: post #542
simonw wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my motivation was money I would cash in on the reputation I've already built and go and land a Silicon Valley salaried job somewhere. Sponsorship from my monthly newsletter doesn't come close. Seriously, do you have any idea how much money I'm leaving on the table right now NOT having a real job in this space? Being a blogger is wildly financially irresponsible!

Lol this argument doesn't hold weight. Do you really want to be an employee? Lets see what your reservation price is first. Im pretty sure you'd need to be paid a lot to forgo having control over your time and so on. Lets keep it one-hunnid.

That's why I haven't got a job: I enjoy the freedom of working for myself, and I have enough of a financial runway from a previous startup acquisition that I can afford to do my own thing for a few more years.

At some point I'm going to need to get back to earning more than I spend.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#544

Post by jheez3 »

fragmede wrote: post #126
snigsnog wrote: post #81

Earlier 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…

> The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Those are some very rosy glasses you've got on there. The nascent Internet took forever to catch on. It was for weird nerds at universities and it'll never catch on, but here we are.

Well until the weird nerds at uni created things like Google, Facebook and so on...

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#545

Post by falkensmaize »

jliptzin wrote: post #459
HumblyTossed wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to be cheeky, but isn’t this just

display: flex; align-items:center;

now?

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#546

Post by threethirtytwo »

jheez3 wrote: post #535
threethirtytwo wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty clear you don't have a solid background in generative models, because this is fundamentally what they do You don’t have a solid background. No one does. We fundamentally don’t understand LLMs, this is an industry and academic opinion. Sure there are high level perspectives and analogies we can apply to LLMs and machine learning in general like probability distributions, curve fitting or interpolations……

"You don’t have a solid background. If you want to go around huffing and puffing your chest about a subject area, you kinda do fella. Credibility.

Not only is what he saying in direct contradiction to what people with credibility have said, but his claimed credentials can be utter bullshit.

This is the internet bro. Credibility is irrelevant because identities can never be verified. So the only thing that matters is the strength and rationality of an argument.

That’s the point of hacker news substantive content not some battle of comparison of credentials or useless quips (like yours) with zero substance. Say something worth reading if you have anything to say at all, otherwise nobody cares.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#547

Post by threethirtytwo »

jheez3 wrote: post #534
habinero wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, frankly it's the difference between actual engineers and hobbyists/amateurs/non-SWEs. SWEs are trained to discard surface-level observations and be adversarial. You can't just look at the happy path, how does the system behave for edge cases? Where does it break down and how? What are the failure modes? The actual analogy to a machine shop would be to look at whether the machines were adequate for their use case,…

I wish there was a way to discern posts from legit clever people from the not-so. Its annoying to see posts from people who lag behind in intelligence and just dont get it - people learn at different rates. Some see way further ahead.

A good way to filter is for you to look in the mirror. Only the person in the mirror sees further ahead than anyone else.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#548

Post by falkensmaize »

celdon25 wrote: post #304
simonw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope so. The big labs are (mostly) investing a lot of resources into reducing the chance their models will trigger self-harm and AI psychosis and suchlike. See the GPT-4o retirement (and resulting backlash) for an example of that. But the number of users is exploding too. If they make things 5x less likely to happen but sign up 10x more people it won't be good on that front.

How does a model “trigger” self-harm? Surely it doesn’t catalyze the dissatisfaction with the human condition, leading to it. There’s no reliable data that can drive meaningful improvement there, and so it is merely an appeasement op. Same thing with “psychosis”, which is a manufactured moral panic crisis. If the AI companies really wanted to reduce actual self harm and psychosis, maybe they’d stop prioritizing featu…

‘How does a model “trigger” self-harm?’

By telling paranoid schizophrenics that their mother is secretly plotting against them and telling suicidal teenagers that they shouldn’t discuss their plans with their parents. That behavior from a human being would likely result in jail time.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#549

Post by biscuit1v9 »

tgv wrote: post #330
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.

This. I don't know why this is not upvoted more.

Education part is on point and as a CS student that sees many of his colleagues using way too much the AI tools for instant homework solving without even processing the answers much.

Re: 2025: The Year in LLMs

#550

Post by signatoremo »

pjc50 wrote: post #289
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…

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

Companies benefiting from trillion dollars spent during the dotcom era certainly make more than a billion dollars, for the last 20 years.

Intellectual dishonesty is certainly rampant on HN.

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