“AI in 2025: gestalt” by technicalities

“AI in 2025: gestalt” by technicalities

Author: LessWrong December 8, 2025 Duration: 41:59
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 [...]
---

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.

---

First published:
December 7th, 2025

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

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:




Dive into a stream of ideas where technology, culture, philosophy, and society intersect, all through the lens of the LessWrong (Curated & Popular) podcast. This isn't a traditional talk show with hosts, but rather a curated audio library of the most impactful writing from the LessWrong community. Each episode is a narration of a full post, selected for its high value and interesting arguments, focusing on pieces that have been formally curated or have garnered significant community approval. You'll hear clear, thoughtful readings of essays that tackle complex topics like artificial intelligence, rational thinking, moral philosophy, and the forces shaping our future. The audio format lets you absorb these dense, often paradigm-shifting concepts during a commute or a walk, turning written analysis into an immersive listening experience. This particular feed is deliberately selective, offering a manageable stream of the community's standout work. For those who want an even deeper dive into the discussion, there are broader feeds available. The LessWrong (Curated & Popular) podcast serves as an intellectual filter, delivering the signal through the noise and inviting you to engage with some of the most rigorously examined ideas on the internet.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Podcast Episodes
"Opinionated Takes on Meetups Organizing" by jenn [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 15:53
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups. And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great. I am here to give you more objectionable adv…
"How to game the METR plot" by shash42 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 12:05
TL;DR: In 2025, we were in the 1-4 hour range, which has only 14 samples in METR's underlying data. The topic of each sample is public, making it easy to game METR horizon length measurements for a frontier lab, sometime…
"Scientific breakthroughs of the year" by technicalities [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 5:55
A couple of years ago, Gavin became frustrated with science journalism. No one was pulling together results across fields; the articles usually didn’t link to the original source; they didn't use probabilities (or even r…
"A high integrity/epistemics political machine?" by Raemon [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 19:04
I have goals that can only be reached via a powerful political machine. Probably a lot of other people around here share them. (Goals include “ensure no powerful dangerous AI get built”, “ensure governance of the US and…
“Insights into Claude Opus 4.5 from Pokémon” by Julian Bradshaw [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:41
Credit: Nano Banana, with some text provided. You may be surprised to learn that ClaudePlaysPokemon is still running today, and that Claude still hasn't beaten Pokémon Red, more than half a year after Google proudly anno…
“The funding conversation we left unfinished” by jenn [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 4:54
People working in the AI industry are making stupid amounts of money, and word on the street is that Anthropic is going to have some sort of liquidity event soon (for example possibly IPOing sometime next year). A lot of…