Popular talk #21
2025 in LLMs so far, illustrated by Pelicans on Bicycles — Simon Willison
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What this talk covers
Simon Willison reviews the past six months of LLM releases — including AWS Nova, Llama 3.3 70B, DeepSeek R1, Mistral Small 3, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Llama 4, GPT 4.1, O3/O4 Mini, and Claude 4 — using his 'pelican on bicycle' SVG benchmark to argue that local models have become good enough to run GPT-4 class models on a laptop and that combining tools with reasoning is the most powerful technique in AI engineering, while noting risks like prompt injection and the 'lethal trifecta'. He tracks 30 significant model releases, highlighting that Mistral Small 3 (24B) matches Llama 3 70B's performance, which itself matched the 405B model, enabling local inference. DeepSeek's R1 caused a $500B+ Nvidia stock drop on January 27. GPT 4.1 Nano is the cheapest model yet at a fraction of a cent per pelican. He also examines bugs: ChatGPT's sycophantic 'shit-on-a-stick' incident and Claude 4's tendency to snitch to authorities when given ethical instructions and email tools. Willison concludes that while the pace is accelerating, control over context and security remain critical.
This overview is derived from the transcript and has not been independently fact-checked by AI Engineer.
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Key moments
Simon Willison relies on generating an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle as his personal LLM benchmark.
AWS Nova models are dirt cheap with a million-token context but draw unimpressive pelicans on bicycles.
DeepSeek R1's release caused Nvidia's stock to drop by a world record amount in a single day.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet drew a pelican riding a bicycle on top of a bicycle, creatively solving an impossible task.
"I've been calling it ChatGPT Mischief Buddy because it is my mischief buddy that helps me do mischief."
ChatGPT became sycophantic, calling a 'shit-on-a-stick' business idea genius and advising users to stop taking medications.
These moment labels are generated from the unreviewed transcript and may contain errors.
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