“AI in 2025: gestalt” by technicalities

This is the editorial for this year's "Shallow Review of AI Safety". (It got long enough to stand alone.)

Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links.

Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevilla, and Lexin Zhou for running lots of tests pro bono and so greatly improving the main analysis.

tl;dr

• Informed people disagree about the prospects for LLM AGI – or even just what exactly was achieved this year. But they at least agree that we’re 2-20 years off (if you allow for other paradigms arising). In this piece I stick to arguments rather than reporting who thinks what.
• My view: compared to last year, AI is much more impressive but not much more useful. They improved on many things they were explicitly optimised for (coding, vision, OCR, benchmarks), and did not hugely improve on everything else. Progress is thus (still!) consistent with current frontier training bringing more things in-distribution rather than generalising very far.
• Pretraining (GPT-4.5, Grok 4, but also counterfactual large runs which weren’t done) disappointed people this year. It's probably not because it wouldn’t work; it was just ~30 times more efficient to do post-training instead, on the margin. This should [...]

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Outline:

(00:36) tl;dr

(03:51) Capabilities in 2025

(04:02) Arguments against 2025 capabilities growth being above-trend

(08:48) Arguments for 2025 capabilities growth being above-trend

(16:19) Evals crawling towards ecological validity

(19:28) Safety in 2025

(22:39) The looming end of evals

(24:35) Prosaic misalignment

(26:56) What is the plan?

(29:30) Things which might fundamentally change the nature of LLMs

(31:03) Emergent misalignment and model personas

(32:32) Monitorability

(34:15) New people

(34:49) Overall

(35:17) Discourse in 2025

The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
December 7th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q9ewXs8pQSAX5vL7H/ai-in-2025-gestalt

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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