If you haven't properly looked since 2023, brace yourself — the jump is violent.
- Models that flunked coding tasks in 2023 now do useful junior-level work on plenty of stacks.
- Image and voice quality crossed from toy to production-grade for a lot of jobs.
- Agent demos that were lab toys hit real business pilots within months, not years.
- Robots went from viral clips to actual factory shifts.
From where I'm sitting today, the frontier models even feel more balanced than the worst of the over-censored phase — less trigger-happy on refusals, more even-handed on the surface, and hallucinating noticeably less than the early GPT days. Not perfect, mind. Still gets things wrong. Still needs checking. But genuinely usable in a way that early 2023 often just wasn't.
And the release cadence is frankly absurd. New frontier models land almost weekly — each cycle a bit faster, sharper, more capable. The CEOs frame 2025–2026 as a turning point in how work itself gets done. Take that as a statement of intent and spend, not prophecy — but note they're putting tens to hundreds of billions behind it because they expect a return.
So "wait and see" is a perfectly valid strategy — as long as you go in clear-eyed about the cost. Waiting can mean your employer adopts AI without you in the room when the decisions get made. It can mean a competitor automates your repetitive slice before you do. The gap quietly widens between people who direct AI and people who don't.
The answer isn't to panic-buy a £500 course off some influencer. It's to follow a plain path — and, eventually, build your own stack, instead of living inside whatever morality filter Silicon Valley settled on this quarter.
Continue — an optional hands-on.