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Gemini 2.5 Pro is certainly a tipping point for me. Previous LLMs have been very impressive, especially on coding tasks (unsurprising as the answers to these ha

Gemini 2.5 Pro is certainly a tipping point for me. Previous LLMs have been very impressive, especially on coding tasks (unsurprising as the answers to these have a preponderance of publicly available data). But outside of a coding assistant, LLMs til now felt like an extra helpful and less garbage-filled Google search. I just used 2.5 Pro to help write a large research proposal (with significant funding on the line). Without going into detail, it felt to me like the only reason it couldn’t write the entire thing itself is because I didn’t ask it to. And by “ask it”, I mean: enter into the laughably small chat box the entire grant solicitation + instructions, a paragraph of general direction for what I want to explore, and a bunch of unstructured artifacts from prior work, and turn it loose. I just wasn’t audacious enough to try that from the start. But as the deadline approached, I got more and more unconstrained in how far back I would step and let it take the reins - doing essentially what’s described above but on isolated sections. It would do pretty ridiculously complex stuff, like generate project plans and timelines, cross reference that correctly with other sections of text, etc. I can safely say it was a 10x force multiplier, and that’s being conservative. For scientific questions (ones that should have publicly available data, not ones relying on internal data), I have started going to 2.5 Pro over senior experts on my own team. And I’m convinced at this point if I were to connect our entire research data corpus to Gemini, that balance would shift even further. Why? Because I can trust it to be objective - not inject its own political or career goals into its answers. I’m at the point where I feel the main thing holding back “AGI” is people’s audacity to push its limits, plus maybe context windows and compute availability. I say this as someone who’s been a major skeptic up until this point.

EvgeniyZh 1y ago
Is your research AI-, or more generally, CS-related? Because I feel that it is still quite bad (by researcher standards) in physics for example.
john_minsk 1y ago
Did you get funding in the end?
MoonGhost 1y ago
LLMs at this point are stateless calculators without personal experience, life goals, obligations, etc. Till recently people expected to have a character like Terminator or HAL. Now we have intelligence separate from 'soul'. Can calculator be AGI? It can be Artificial, General, and Intelligence. We may need another word for 'creature' with some features of living being.
- dcow 1y ago
  The term AI has always bothered me for this reason. If the thing is intelligent, then there’s nothing artificial about it… it’s almost an oxymoron. There are two subtly different definitions in use: (1) “like intelligence in useful ways, but not actually”, and (2) “actually intelligent, but not of human wetware”. I take the A in AGI to be of type (2). LLMs are doing (1), right now. They may have the “neurological structure” required for (2), but to make a being General and Intelligent it needs to compress its context window persist it to storage every night as it sleeps. It needs memory and agency. It needs to be able to learn in real time and self-adjusting its own weights. And if it’s doing all that, then who is to say it doesn't have a soul?
  - Jensson 1y ago
    > If the thing is intelligent, then there’s nothing artificial about it… it’s almost an oxymoron. Artificial means human made, if we made a thing that is intelligent, then it is artificial intelligence. It is like "artificial insemination" means a human designed system to inseminate rather than the natural way. It is still a proper insemination, artificial doesn't mean "fake", it just means unnatural/human made.
    - europeanNyan 1y ago
      > Artificial means human made, if we made a thing that is intelligent, then it is artificial intelligence. Aren't humans themselves essentially human made? Maybe a better definition would be non-human (or inorganic if we want to include intelligence like e.g. dolphins)?
valenterry 1y ago
And yet it fails with every second refactoring that I ask it to do in a mediocre complicated codebase. What am I doing wrong?
- lm28469 1y ago
  IMHO it basically is judgment day, all the people boasting about 100x productivity and "chatgpt basically replaced my job and/or colleagues" had bullshit jobs
- oytis 1y ago
  Might be because you are an expert in what you ask it to do, and actually care about the result. E.g. I'm not sure what a marketing or otherwise business professional would say about the work it did on the cheese business. What has caught my eye is that projected cost of doing business (salaries) is unrealistically low, especially as the volumes are expected to grow
burkaman 1y ago
> For scientific questions (ones that should have publicly available data, not ones relying on internal data), I have started going to 2.5 Pro over senior experts on my own team. Have you asked any of your experts to double check those bot answers to see how it did?
- plaidfuji 1y ago
  Yep
chunkmonke99 1y ago
LLMs have broad adoption since like 2 years ago: my GF and sister both have used previous models to write (successful) grant applications with previous iterations so "AGI" has been here since chatgpt's initial release if that is the metric (or baby AGI). I view these as a novel way of "re-configuring" and "re-mixing" human knowledge and that is a BIG DEAL! Also, I am not sure I agree with "people's lack of audacity" is holding back LLMs from achieving "AGI": Dario, Demi, and Sam Altman are promising the end of disease and death in the next 2 to 10 years! And those are some audacious claims (even if they come to be).
oytis 1y ago
> Why? Because I can trust it to be objective - not inject its own political or career goals into its answers. And that is basically why humanity is doomed.
xur17 1y ago
Strongly agreed. I used Gemini 2.5 Pro over the weekend to build an entire website + backend system in 8 hours, and it would have taken me over a week to get to the same place myself. My total bill for the entire thing? $10. I am using Gemini 2.5 Flash for analyzing screenshots of webpages as part of it. Total cost for that (assuming I did my math right) ? $0.00002 / image.
- valenterry 1y ago
  It's actually pretty good at that, especially layout/design. The problem is, the code it produces is usually not great and inconsistent and has subtle bugs. That quickly becomes a problem if you want to change things later, especially while keeping your data consistent and your APIs stable and backwards compatible. At least that's my experience. But for building something that you can easily throw away later, it's pretty good and saves a lot of time.
vladsanchez 1y ago
Do you write or blog so that I can follow your writings or opinions elsewhere? You can email me at vlad dot sanchez at gmail dot com. Thanks.

EvgeniyZh 1y ago

Is your research AI-, or more generally, CS-related? Because I feel that it is still quite bad (by researcher standards) in physics for example.

john_minsk 1y ago

Did you get funding in the end?

MoonGhost 1y ago

LLMs at this point are stateless calculators without personal experience, life goals, obligations, etc. Till recently people expected to have a character like Terminator or HAL. Now we have intelligence separate from 'soul'. Can calculator be AGI? It can be Artificial, General, and Intelligence. We may need another word for 'creature' with some features of living being.

dcow 1y ago
The term AI has always bothered me for this reason. If the thing is intelligent, then there’s nothing artificial about it… it’s almost an oxymoron. There are two subtly different definitions in use: (1) “like intelligence in useful ways, but not actually”, and (2) “actually intelligent, but not of human wetware”. I take the A in AGI to be of type (2). LLMs are doing (1), right now. They may have the “neurological structure” required for (2), but to make a being General and Intelligent it needs to compress its context window persist it to storage every night as it sleeps. It needs memory and agency. It needs to be able to learn in real time and self-adjusting its own weights. And if it’s doing all that, then who is to say it doesn't have a soul?
- Jensson 1y ago
  > If the thing is intelligent, then there’s nothing artificial about it… it’s almost an oxymoron. Artificial means human made, if we made a thing that is intelligent, then it is artificial intelligence. It is like "artificial insemination" means a human designed system to inseminate rather than the natural way. It is still a proper insemination, artificial doesn't mean "fake", it just means unnatural/human made.
  - europeanNyan 1y ago
    > Artificial means human made, if we made a thing that is intelligent, then it is artificial intelligence. Aren't humans themselves essentially human made? Maybe a better definition would be non-human (or inorganic if we want to include intelligence like e.g. dolphins)?

valenterry 1y ago

And yet it fails with every second refactoring that I ask it to do in a mediocre complicated codebase. What am I doing wrong?

lm28469 1y ago
IMHO it basically is judgment day, all the people boasting about 100x productivity and "chatgpt basically replaced my job and/or colleagues" had bullshit jobs
oytis 1y ago
Might be because you are an expert in what you ask it to do, and actually care about the result. E.g. I'm not sure what a marketing or otherwise business professional would say about the work it did on the cheese business. What has caught my eye is that projected cost of doing business (salaries) is unrealistically low, especially as the volumes are expected to grow

burkaman 1y ago

> For scientific questions (ones that should have publicly available data, not ones relying on internal data), I have started going to 2.5 Pro over senior experts on my own team. Have you asked any of your experts to double check those bot answers to see how it did?

plaidfuji 1y ago
Yep

chunkmonke99 1y ago

LLMs have broad adoption since like 2 years ago: my GF and sister both have used previous models to write (successful) grant applications with previous iterations so "AGI" has been here since chatgpt's initial release if that is the metric (or baby AGI). I view these as a novel way of "re-configuring" and "re-mixing" human knowledge and that is a BIG DEAL! Also, I am not sure I agree with "people's lack of audacity" is holding back LLMs from achieving "AGI": Dario, Demi, and Sam Altman are promising the end of disease and death in the next 2 to 10 years! And those are some audacious claims (even if they come to be).

oytis 1y ago

> Why? Because I can trust it to be objective - not inject its own political or career goals into its answers. And that is basically why humanity is doomed.

xur17 1y ago

Strongly agreed. I used Gemini 2.5 Pro over the weekend to build an entire website + backend system in 8 hours, and it would have taken me over a week to get to the same place myself. My total bill for the entire thing? $10. I am using Gemini 2.5 Flash for analyzing screenshots of webpages as part of it. Total cost for that (assuming I did my math right) ? $0.00002 / image.

valenterry 1y ago
It's actually pretty good at that, especially layout/design. The problem is, the code it produces is usually not great and inconsistent and has subtle bugs. That quickly becomes a problem if you want to change things later, especially while keeping your data consistent and your APIs stable and backwards compatible. At least that's my experience. But for building something that you can easily throw away later, it's pretty good and saves a lot of time.

vladsanchez 1y ago

Do you write or blog so that I can follow your writings or opinions elsewhere? You can email me at vlad dot sanchez at gmail dot com. Thanks.