2025 AI Index Report

I always see these reports about how much better AI is than humans now, but I can't even get it to help me with pretty mundane problem solving. Yesterday I gave Claude a file with a few hundred lines of code, what the input should be, and told it where the problem was. I tried until I ran out of credits and it still could not work backwards to tell me where things were going wrong. In the end I just did it myself and it turned out to be a pretty obvious problem.

The strange part with these LLMs is that they get weirdly hung up on things. I try to direct them away from a certain type of output and somehow they keep going back to it. It's like the same problem I have with Google where if I try to modify my search to be more specific, it just ignores what it doesn't like about my query and gives me the same output.

LLMs are difficult to use. Anyone who tells you otherwise is being misleading.

"Hey these tools are kind of disappointing"

"You just need to learn to use them right"

Ad infinitum as we continue to get middling results from the most overhyped piece of technology of all time.

That's why I try not to hype it.

You're the biggest hype merchant for this technology on this entire website. Please.

I've been banging the drum about how unintuitive and difficult this stuff is for over a year now: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

I'm one of the loudest voices about the so-far unsolved security problems inherent in this space: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ (94 posts)

I also have 149 posts about the ethics of it: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ - including one of the first high profile projects to explore the issue around copyrighted data used in training sets: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/5/laion-aesthetics-weekno...

One of the reasons I do the "pelican riding a bicycle" thing is that it's a great way to deflate the hype around these tools - the supposedly best LLM in the world still draws a pelican that looks like it was done by a five year old! https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

If you want AI hype there are a thousand places on the internet you can go to get it. I try not to be one of them.