LLMs and AI in 2025: experiments, frustrations, and a few big surprises

2025 has been a year of hands-on experimentation for us with LLMs and applied AI. Instead of just watching the space from the sidelines, we spent the year building, testing, breaking things, and trying ideas that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

The overall feeling is mixed. Some parts of the tech are impressive and moving incredibly fast. Other parts still feel early and fragile. Here’s a summary of what we learned and how it’s shaping what we want to do next.

LLMs: A Real Use Case

TLDR: We worked on implementing LLMs, Vector DB, and RAG for elMejorTrato.com. We concluded that:

• Working with Spanish language has its tricks
• ChatGPT API is too costly
• LangChain and agents are sometimes an overkill
• With SentenceBert and a VectorDB, marvelous things can be done
• Quantized open-source LLMs give very good results

How to Learn AI from Scratch?

To learn Artificial Intelligence from scratch, FreeCodingTour offers three courses that should be taken in the following order:

1. Programming
2. Data Science
3. Artificial Intelligence