2025 in LLMs so far, illustrated by Pelicans on Bicycles — Simon Willison
Jul 9, 2025 · 18:30
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.
