Two releases, one day: one will change your work, the other your feed
Gemini 2.5 Pro and native image generation in GPT-4o both arrived today. Only one of them is a business capability.
Today, 25 March 2025, Google introduced Gemini 2.5 Pro, a reasoning-focused model, and OpenAI turned on native image generation inside GPT-4o for its paying and free tiers. Both are significant; they are significant to completely different audiences.
The one that matters for work
Gemini 2.5 Pro is another entry in the reasoning category that has defined the last six months, with a very large context window. For an SME the practical consequence is the same as after every such release: the capability you evaluated in January is now available from three providers instead of two, and the price of the previous tier drifts down.
Nothing to do today. It reinforces the advice this blog has repeated since October: keep contracts short and do not build so tightly around one provider that changing means rebuilding.
The one that will flood your marketing channel
Native image generation inside a chat product, available to free users, produces a predictable few weeks: your social feed fills with stylised images, and someone in your company will ask whether you should be doing that too.
Two practical points, and one legal one.
It is genuinely useful for small marketing budgets. Concept visuals, background images, illustrations for an internal presentation. Work that previously did not happen because it could not be justified.
It is not useful for anything that must be accurate. Your product, your machine, your building. A generated approximation of a real thing you sell is a misrepresentation, and the fact that it looks convincing makes it worse rather than better.
Generated style is not a safe harbour. Imitating a recognisable visual style, particularly a living artist’s or a competitor’s brand identity, is a commercial risk regardless of how the image was made. If you would not have commissioned a human to copy it, do not publish a machine’s copy of it either.
The dividing line
Use generated images where you would previously have used a stock photograph. Do not use them where a customer could reasonably believe they are looking at a photograph of your actual work.
That single sentence covers essentially every case an SME will meet this year.