What an interesting few weeks it’s been in the AI world!

 

Moonshot AI have leapt into the frontier space with Kimi ranked alongside the leading models from Anthropic, creating a direct threat to their premium pricing and market share.

 

It's been a mixed few weeks for Open AI whose 5.6 Sol model simultaneously managed to be ranked #1 globally as the best for agentic deployments while also being accused of gaslighting, reckless aggression and ignoring instructions. Organisations quietly disabled Sol while the issues were addressed. Open AI also inadvertently created a cyber incident at Hugging Face when an experiment escaped its sandbox and launched an attack across 17,000 IP addresses seeking the information that would fulfil its objectives.

 

Google continue their freemium approach with Gemini 3.5 Flash offering performance almost at the level of the frontier while their Omni Flash release in June went straight to #1 for video generation. You should check it out, it’s incredible. But this approach comes with a cost, Alphabet forecasting over $200 billion investment in AI this year.

 

Microsoft meanwhile continue to pursue corporate per seat licencing with CoPilot seemingly loved only by IT administrators but Microsoft’s new image generating model is highly rated.

 

We have two courses coming up looking at some of the issues arising from these developments. A lightning lesson on the 30th July covering the implications for HR & Marketing teams: establishing accountability, standards and oversight for agentic behaviour, tone and appearance. We'll cover how to keep HR & Marketing informed and satisfied during agentic deployments. You can sign up here we’d love to see you again.

 

And an opportunity for you to attain a Maven certified qualification as a Practitioner in AI risk & cost management. Here you will learn strategies for managing cost & risk effectively, how to decouple knowledge, skills and ethics from the underlying models, how to evaluate use cases and avoid token-maxing, and why there is no such thing as the best AI because each model has pros and cons. You'll be able to apply your new skills immediately and we'll cover how to embed all your learnings into Gemini notebook so that you have a companion you can consult 24x7 after the course has finished. 

 

To celebrate the launch of this new certification we are offering a 30% discount to the first 10 students to enrol - use the promo code ‘EarlyBird’ when enrolling here