Welcome to the first bonus episode of the TechMeme Right 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. 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 Swix, who has been on the show back, even going back to the Twitter spaces days,

but also an AI guru in their own right.

Swix, thanks for coming on the show also.

Thanks.

Happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to contribute as well.

And a good friend of the pod, as they say.

All right.

Let's go right into it.

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?

Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness. 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. They go growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting at

the same time. They didn't get massively better than GPT4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of

...