The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
simonwillison.net
The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
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Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#2[dead]
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#3It’s good to see dates being hard coded re. Improvements in the models that should deliver material gains.
As time progresses one now has a yard stick to measure against progress. No more excuses - show me the money baby.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#4I met Simon for the first time this year at pycon. Wow, what a great guy.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#5Somewhere right now some human artist is being tasked with drawing illustrations of pelicans riding bicycles to be used as training data at a big AI lab.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#6Somewhere right now some human artist is being tasked with drawing illustrations of pelicans riding bicycles to be used as training data at a big AI lab.
Every modern image-generation model can generate a pelican on a bicycle trivially. The point of the test is to generate SVG text that represents an image, which is more complicated.
Yes, there are ways to convert raster images to SVG for use in training data but it's not a good use of anyone's time.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#7> and there’s zero chance any AI lab would train a model for such a ridiculous task.
I'm not sure that's true anymore considering how popular Simon's blog is
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#8December 2025 was the breakthrough for me.
January Claude was euphoric, ChatGPT was up there. February Gemini cooked for a second there. March amazing. April the big bad nerf. May GPT 5.5 is just pure bliss altough 2x limits temporarily, not sure about Claude it's sort of okay still not as good as it felt before, slowly increasing limits with more compute and rebuilding good will.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#9I'm so glad Simon is documenting this. The field is evolving so fast, so rapidly, so hungry for data and money, that few are willing to zoom out and document everything big picture so we can see the changes over time.
I mean do you guys remember "Do anything now"? Just a distant memory, a funny party trick.
Re: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
#10I wonder how much the 'inflection point' is a thing vs marketing. I'm sure the models got somewhat better, but even now when I'm trying to 'vibe code' a game with the latest models (combination of Codex w/ gpt5.5 and gpt5.3-codex), they really do struggle.
They definitely get something barebones up and running, but it's far from a fully fledged application.