alt Hacker NewsAll 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 the opinion of. People are willing to pay $200 per month, and it is getting $1B dollar runway already.
Being more of a Hardware person, the most interesting part to me is the funding of all the developments of latest hardware. I know this is another topic HN hate because of the DRAM and NAND pricing issue. But it is exciting to see this from a long term view where the pricing are short term pain. Right now the industry is asking, we have together over a trillion dollar to spend on Capex over the next few years and will even borrow more if it needs to be, when can you ship us 16A / 14A / 10A and 8A or 5A, LPDDR6, Higher Capacity DRAM at lower power usage, better packaging, higher speed PCIe or a jump to optical interconnect? Every single part of the hardware stack are being fused with money and demand. The last time we have this was Post-PC / Smartphone era which drove the hardware industry forward for 10 - 15 years. The current AI can at least push hardware for another 5 - 6 years while pulling forward tech that was initially 8 - 10 years away.
I so wished I brought some Nvidia stock. Again, I guess no one knew AI would be as big as it is today, and it is only just started.
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2025 was the year of development tool using AI agents. I think we'll shift attention to non development tool using AI agents. Most business users are still stuck using chat gpt as some kind of grand oracle that will write their email or powerpoint slides. There are bits and pieces of mostly technology demo level solutions but nothing that is widely used like AI coding tools are so far. I don't think this is bottle necked on model quality.
I don't need an AGI. I do need a secretary type agent that deals with all the simple but yet laborious non technical tasks that keep infringing on my quality engineering time. I'm CTO for a small startup and the amount of non technical bullshit that I need to deal with is enormous. Some examples of random crap I deal with: figuring out contracts, their meaning/implication to situations, and deciding on a course of action; Customer offers, price calculations, scraping invoices from emails and online SAAS accounts, formulating detailed replies to customer requests, HR legal work, corporate bureaucracy, financial planning, etc.
A lot of this stuff can be AI assisted (and we get a lot of value out of ai tools for this) but context engineering is taking up a non trivial amount of my time. Also most tools are completely useless at modifying structured documents. Refactoring a big code base, no problem. Adding structured text to an existing structured document, hardest thing ever. The state of the art here is an ff-ing sidebar that will suggest you a markdown formatted text that you might copy/paste. Tool quality is very primitive. And then you find yourself just stripping all formatting and reformatting it manually. Because the tools really suck at this.
> All these improvement in a single year
> hard to argue against the value of current AI
> People are willing to pay $200 per month, and it is getting $1B dollar runway already.
Those are 3 different things. There can be a LOT of fast and significant improvements but still remain extremely far from the actual goal, so far it looks like actually little progress.
People pay for a lot of things, including snake oil, so convincing a lot of people to pay a bit is not in itself a proof of value, especially when some people are basically coerced into this, see how many companies changed their "strategy" to mandating AI usage internally, or integration for a captive audience e.g. Copilot.
Finally yes, $1B is a LOT of money for you and I... but for the largest corporations it's actually not a lot. For reference Google earned that in revenue... per day in 2023. Anyway that's still a big number BUT it still has to be compared with, well how much does OpenAI burn. I don't have any public number on that but I believe the consensus is that it's a lot. So until we know that number we can't talk about an actual runway.
Investing a trillion dollars for a revenue of a billion dollars doesn't sound great yet.
Is the AI progress in 2025 an outstanding breakthrough? Not really. It's impressive but incremental.
Still, the gap between the capabilities of a cutting edge LLM and that of a human is only this wide. There are only this many increments it takes to cross it.
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
Seems like Nvidia will be focusing on the super beefy GPUs and leaving the consumer market to a smaller player
Literally the only thing I've encountered regarding LLMS and AGI is morons stating that LLMs will never become AGI. I literally have no idea where the AGI arguments are coming from. No one who I've ever worked with who uses LLMs is talking about AGI. It's just a fucking distraction from actually usable tools right now. Is there anything except a strawman for LLM AGI?
This is not a great argument:
> But it is hard to argue against the value of current AI [...] it is getting $1B dollar runway already.
The psychic services industry makes over $2 billion a year in the US [1], with about a quarter of the population being actual believers. [2].
[1] The https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/psychic-ser...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692738/paranormal-phenomena-met...