Gemini, subscriptions and learning Python

From my archive, written 14 February 2024. These are my impressions at the time.

GPT was down today, I used Gemini which is the new version which replaced bard and seems to be slightly smarter, it passed the question that Bard couldn’t answer which was “If it takes three hours to dry three towels, how long does it take to dry 9 towels?” So it has some thinking capabilities instead of assuming patterns. Funny thing is, GPT 3.5 has failed this towel question whereas I’m sure that it passed it when I asked the last time, the other day it couldn’t even give me a list of 10 names and gave me one at a time even though I asked five times for a list of 10.

I’m 80% sure that OpenAI are making their 3.5 version way dumber intentionally to push people towards the £20 2.0 model. Google seem to be doing better, they offer their own £19 a month subscription for a premium model and I’m pissed off that GPT has set the expectations of consumers for it to be this price because its just too much, half that amount is maybe acceptable but £20 a month is a lot. I don’t even think it represents what they need, I think its more that they’ve seen that amount to be successful with GPT 4 and are copying it as a result.

AI is so fucking fascinating, I was thinking about getting a job in it, I thought about learning python and making my own AI chatbot, watched a YouTube video explaining how to get involved with AI in 2024 and the number one piece of advice was to start learning python since its so widely used. And then talk about perfect timing, my uni sent an email to all students stating that they’ve partnered with Google to offer their free courses through Coursera and upon completion of the course you’ll be reimbursed the full £120!

It takes place over three months and there’s three courses that are being offered: Google data analytics, Google project management and a crash course on python. What are the odds of me looking into learning python and this comes up? I took about an hour of looking into it before I applied and I feel I have a good chance of getting into it. The application deadline is 1st March and the course will begin on the 4th of March, the python course has five modules that go massively in depth about python and I’m really excited.

I was about to try and learn this anyway through YouTube so this is a great opportunity, now I’ll have a certificate on LinkedIn proving I’ve completed the course and its not like its with some random company either but from Google. Its a starting point to working in this area and even if I don’t go in this direction then it counts for something on my page and its free anyway so who cares.