January: the month every gym is full and every AI lab publishes a roadmap. In the spirit of the season, I've obtained* the industry's New Year's resolutions. (*Made them up. But you'll recognize everyone.)
The resolutions
The frontier model: "This year I will stop beginning every answer with 'Great question!' I will say 'I don't know' at least once. I will not invent a court case."
The AI lab: "We resolve to name our next model something a normal person can remember. We acknowledge that our last release was called something like Orion-o4-mini-high-turbo and that our own staff calls it 'the new one.'"
The enterprise: "This year we will move at least one of our forty-seven pilots to production. We will stop calling the innovation lab 'the innovation lab.' We will admit the chatbot on our website is a PDF in a trench coat."
The consultant: "I resolve to include at least one slide with a number on it."
The doomer and the accelerationist (joint statement): "We resolve to keep arguing on the internet so the rest of you don't have to."
The construction guy with an ERP (hi): "I resolve to keep shipping the boring version that works — agents that finish tasks, gates that stay shut, and a public list of my own bugs, because the industry has enough roadmaps and not enough changelogs."
The one serious paragraph
Resolutions fail when they're identities instead of systems — "become an AI company" versus "automate these six workflows and measure them." Businesses are no different in January than people are. Pick the six workflows. Write them down. Check back in March. That's the whole trick, and it's this blog's entire editorial policy.
New year, same architecture. That's a feature.