A few AI Predictions for 2024
Will this list be a crystal ball or a bowling ball?
2023 was the year that AI became a part of the national conversation, and everyone from CEOs to lawyers to doctors to scientists to students were experimenting with the new technology in some way. Some companies jumped all in, and we also saw an explosion of startups with new ideas, new technologies, and new ways to solve old problems. I’m actually a little bit surprise that Time Magazine didn’t name AI as “person” of the year given the impact (not going to argue against their choice though – Taylor Swift is truly amazing!)
We’re just at the beginning of the impact that AI will have on society and the world – and I don’t think we can truly even wrap our heads around the impact that AGI will have when it arrives (not making a specific prediction on that other than it’s probably a lot sooner than most people think).
There are so many areas that AI is going to have an impact on this upcoming year – on medicine, on education, on the environment, on the arts and so much more. One of our biggest challenges as a society will be trying to keep up with the pace of technological innovation which seems to be moving faster and faster right now. As we close out 2023, I thought I would take a minute to make a few predictions about what I see happening in AI this upcoming year.
ChatGPT (from OpenAI): ChatGPT is the clear leader in the GenAI space right now and the innovation is going to keep them ahead of the competition through 2024. I think we’re going to see V4.5 released early in 2024 with a substantial improvement in speed and overall performance, and we’ll see a truly groundbreaking multi-modal V5 sometime in the fall. We will very likely see DALL·E4 come out by mid-year with the ability to generate even more realistic images like Midjourney V6 – and I would not at all be surprised if we see a similar toolset released to create videos and music as well. I think that ChatGPT (and Microsoft’s version in CoPilot) is going to solidify its position as the leader in corporate environments.
Rise of the Smart Personal Assistants: I think we’re going to see the emergence of a true smart personal assistant that has access to all of your info (e.g. your mail, your chats, what you watch, where you travel, where you work, where you eat, what you shop for, when you make appointments for various services) and acts and reacts for you based on who you are and what you do. I think that while Google and Apple will have dominant positions in this space – we need to watch new entrants like Humane that push our thinking on what the right interface is. To start - think Siri but 1M times smarter with a mini-LLM on the phone for incredible context, analysis and privacy.
Gemini takes a massive leap forward (for consumers): In late November of 2023 we saw the release of Gemini Pro and Ultra (although Ultra is not available to the public yet) – and we’ve seen Ultra at least on paper come close to catching up to and beating ChatGPT V4.0 in some benchmarks. While I stated above that ChatGPT will continue to have the best overall model in this upcoming year (from an analytics and raw capability standpoint), I think Google’s going to pull ahead on integrating the best content library. The full access they have to the entire web via search, the full access to content on YouTube (probably the fastest growing media company in the world), information on travel (flights, hotels), information on shopping, restaurant reviews and so much more – I think that if Google can find a way to really integrate all of this they will leap forward and have the best consumer LLM because of the content.
Fake media will be indistinguishable from real media: The models around speech and video are getting so good now that by the middle of 2024 – fake media will truly be indistinguishable from real media. This opens a whole host of safety and privacy issues that we need to come together as a society and address. It’s going to have implications on elections, education, careers, and so much more. This will get amplified in the social media bubbles and targeted content that people consume and we’re going to have to figure out new ways to deal with this problem.
New tools for Personal Knowledge Management: We’re going to see the continued expansion of personal knowledge management tools. Companies like Mem AI and Augment AI are rethinking how we capture all of the interactions we have on our devices and allow us to ‘remember’ everything and query it through a chat interface. Notion has become my favorite personal database. The expansion I’m looking forward to this year is the ability not to just capture what I’m doing and seeing everyday – but have a full history of what I’ve done (at least through email, documents created, web sites searched assuming I still have it cached) – so I can get a true smart repository to query for personal and business content (past, present and future!).
Open-source innovation accelerates: We’re seeing incredible innovations coming out of the open-source community and that’s going to accelerate this year. We’re seeing smarter, smaller models being able to perform at the same or better levels than we’re seeing from some bigger models. I think we’re going to see this trend not only continue and accelerate, but we’re going to start seeing open-source models pop up in all sorts of places and products that create truly unique capabilities. The large private companies have real benefits in terms of capital and access to GPUs, but I would never underestimate the power of a massive and distributed community to create real breakthroughs. Some large open-source models will certainly catch up to GPT V4.0 this year – how much further it will go will really be dependent on access to training data.
The rise of general agents: Like the rise in smart personal assistants, this is the year we also start to see truly autonomous agents that can act independently and with other agents to drive real productivity for individuals and businesses. Emerging general agents will be able to take full advantage of the new multi-modal models, act alone or interoperate with other agents to accomplish tasks and run in many places including personal devices (e.g. iPhone). I think that Microsoft and Salesforce will be the big winners on the corporate side here, and on the consumer side it’s going to be a race between Google and Apple, and both will have compelling offerings for their respective ecosystems.
Emergence of next generation AI tools for GTM and RevOps : I’ve been working with a team this past few months, and we have identified over 60 areas in various GTM motions that will be significantly impacted by AI (15 alone in RevOps). Over this past year I’ve had the pleasure of speaking and working with over a dozen startups that are focused on improving various GTM capabilities through AI and all of them should be launched by early this year if they haven’t already. There are significant productivity and capability benefits when using these tools that smart GTM teams will take advantage of (from more accurate predicting of churn risk to identifying upsell/cross-sell opportunities to tighter sales forecasting to RFP creation to territory mapping to sales enablement and so much more). 2024 will be a breakout year for GTM performance improvements thanks to new AI tools.
So – those are my thoughts for 2024. There are so many other areas I could have made predictions in, but this seemed like a good place to end the list. Not too big, not too small – a Goldilocks list – just right.
I hope that everyone has a happy and safe Holiday Season, and I’m personally looking forward to an incredible 2024!
Best,
Steve
steve@revopz.net