Strike Me Down: GenAI on the Ropes

2025 will be the year when the big vendors realised their ambition outweighed their talent. The last time I heard that phrase was from the lips of Casey Stoner. It's a biker term but very useful at work. Microsoft's Copilot, if you look under the hood, is on soft earth. OpenAI are running out of money. There are only two genuinely large public LLMs: OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Two is always better than one, but what's next

In your home, Microsoft have already thrown in the towel. Copilot will be free (as in, included) or dirt cheap. Google are still trying to charge but have been forced to bundle Gemini into their higher tier Google One plans. It won't be long before they realise that £20 is too high for personal users. Not least because those with a family plan will soon find that the 'family sharing' element does not apply to AI. Oh no.

Dare we turn over the stone that is Apple Intelligence? Forced to abandon their news summaries which read like the stark ravings of a deranged R2D2, they are on the back foot. So bad (and behind) is their product that is still lives in a rickety beta middle earth, consigned to a right-click menu somewhere you will never find it. Even their premium connection to ChatGPT doesn't work: you cannot even login. Take a look at the chat forums and find someone with MacOS who got it working.

This is a very poor show. Where is Amazon and AWS? Nowhere. As you will see elsewhere, Gartner are predicting a bumpy year for Gen AI. I go further: it's already bumpy as hell and the bridge is out.

Urged on by a colleague, I tried out the premium version of ChatGPT. While snoozing through an episode of the terrible BBC drama Strike, I decided to find out if the word Anomie had a meaning. Was it an anagram of an actual word? ChatGPT gave me two options: Aeonim and Moaine. Granted they are valid anagrams, but valid words they are not. As I write this, my spell checker confirms it. This is the premium edition, remember. I decided to delve into that old friend, the dictionary. It told me quite correctly that Anomie is itself a word: it refers to a lack of the usual social standards in a group or person.