Episode Details

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The world’s top AI blogger and friend of every pod, Simon Willison, dropped a monster 2024 recap: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Brian of the excellent TechMeme Ride Home pinged us for a connection and a special crossover episode, our first in 2025.

The target audience for this podcast is a tech-literate, but non-technical one. You can see Simon’s notes for AI Engineers in his World’s Fair Keynote.

Timestamp

* 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

* 01:06 State of AI in 2025

* 01:43 Advancements in AI Models

* 03:59 Cost Efficiency in AI

* 06:16 Challenges and Competition in AI

* 17:15 AI Agents and Their Limitations

* 26:12 Multimodal AI and Future Prospects

* 35:29 Exploring Video Avatar Companies

* 36:24 AI Influencers and Their Future

* 37:12 Simplifying Content Creation with AI

* 38:30 The Importance of Credibility in AI

* 41:36 The Future of LLM User Interfaces

* 48:58 Local LLMs: A Growing Interest

* 01:07:22 AI Wearables: The Next Big Thing

* 01:10:16 Wrapping Up and Final Thoughts

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome

[00:00:00] Brian: Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Tech Meme Write Home for the year 2025. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. Listeners to the pod over the last year know that I have made a habit of quoting from Simon Willison when new stuff happens in AI from his blog. Simon has been, become a go to for many folks in terms of, you know, Analyzing things, criticizing things in the AI space.

[00:00:33] Brian: I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, Simon. So thank you for coming on the show. No, it's a privilege to be here. And the person that made this connection happen is our friend Swyx, who has been on the show back, even going back to the, the Twitter Spaces days but also an AI guru in, in their own right Swyx, thanks for coming on the show also.

[00:00:54] swyx (2): Thanks. I'm happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to [00:01:00] contribute as well.

[00:01:00] Brian: And a good friend of the pod, as they say. Alright, let's go right into it.

[00:01:06] State of AI in 2025

[00:01:06] Brian: Simon, I'm going to do the most unfair, broad question first, so let's get it out of the way. The year 2025. Broadly, what is the state of AI as we begin this year?

[00:01:20] Brian: Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness.

[00:01:22] Simon: Wow. So many things, right? I mean, the big thing is everything's got really good and fast and cheap. Like, that was the trend throughout all of 2024. The good models got so much cheaper, they got so much faster, they got multimodal, right? The image stuff isn't even a surprise anymore.

[00:01:39] Simon: They're growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting.

[00:01:43] Advancements in AI Models

[00:01:43] Simon: At the same time, they didn't get massively better than GPT 4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of one of the open questions is, are we going to see huge, but I kind of feel like that's a bit of a distraction because GPT 4, but way cheaper, much larger context lengths, and it [00: