Every technology goes through an evolutionary arc, triggering the breakout moment by a strategic breakthrough event. For Artificial Intelligence (AI), that moment was the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
As per Emerging Technology Survey 2023, of the 54% companies surveyed, more than half have integrated generative AI in their business operations within a year. With the tremendous growth in AI in 2023, we have to ask: What does 2024 hold for AI? Will the hype convert into a robust AI ecosystem?
Here, we make 6 bold predictions about the major developments and innovations shaping AI in 2024. Let’s quickly recap AI’s wild 2023 year and what the future holds now.
2023: A Year in AI
January: Released in November 2022, ChatGPT marked the beginning of AI’s explosive growth. By January 2023, ChatGPT became the fastest service to reach 100 million monthly active users (within 2 months).
February: Google announces ChatGPT competitor Bard, kickstarting the AI wars.
March: OpenAI makes significant advancements with the release of GPT-4, APIs for ChatGPT, and its text-to-speech model Whisper.
April: Google announces Google DeepMind, combining the teams of Google Research and DeepMind.
May: Microsoft announces AI assistant for Windows 11, and NVIDIA reaches a $1 trillion market cap fueled by the AI boom.
June: The European Parliament makes significant developments on the EU AI Act. It is the first time a widely recognized regulatory body has penned down AI regulation.
July: Meta announces its open-source LLM model Llama 2, and Anthropic releases ChatGPT competitor Claude 2.
August: Quora announces its own AI chatbot called ‘Poe’.
September: Amazon makes historic $4 billion investment into OpenAI competitor Anthropic.
October-November: Elon Musk announces AI chatbot for X called ‘Grok.’ Also, chaos emerges with the OpenAI board as Sam Altman is briefly fired as CEO (and later reinstated).
December: Google announces Gemini, its multimodal AI model.
AI in 2024: What’s to Come
Prediction#1: Increased Regulation and the Need for Compliance
As AI takes off and continues its upward ascent, the technology will come under increased scrutiny from regulatory bodies. This has been evident from 2023 events such as the EU AI Act and the U.S. Senate hearings on AI.
Regulation has become a concern even inside the private sector, such as the recent events with OpenAI where disagreements emerged over AI regulation.
We predict that 2024 will mark a significant moment socially and legally for AI regarding what it should be used for and how it should be used.
Prediction#2: The Rise of Multimodal AI
After Large Language models (LLMs), diffusion models, and generative AI, we will see even more powerful new ways of AI interaction emerge in 2024 with ‘Multimodal AI’.
With this, users can use images, speech, numerical data, etc., to interact with the AI systems intuitively. Think of Google’s recent announcement of its Gemini LLM model, which will succeed LaMDA and PaLM 2 with multimodal AI capabilities.
OpenAI’s GPT-4 has multimodal capabilities in research settings, with multimodal features available in ChatGPT for plus and enterprise users.
Prediction#3: AI Personal Assistants as ‘Copilots’ Will Gain Traction
We predict AI will enable every user to have their own personalized assistants to help accomplish more with less. Moreover, companies will equip their customers with an AI assistant to give each user more personalized interaction.
Companies can also train AI on internal data to create personal AI assistants, enabling employees to work better and smarter with a personal AI sidekick.
Prediction#4: AI Deepfakes Will Make Misinformation and Political Propaganda Bigger Problems
Digital misinformation and its influence on politics have been a widespread concern since the onset of social media. But now, with the rise of AI-generated multimedia propaganda, i.e., ‘deepfakes’, the problem will become a force multiplier.
Especially with elections in the U.S. in 2024 and other parts of the world, such as India, being able to tell if a certain video, audio, or image is real or AI-generated will be an important issue.
Prediction#5: How We Look Up Information Online Will Change
Today, looking up information online involves typing something into a search engine and getting search results pointing to different websites. But now, with the rise of advanced models like Bard and ChatGPT, the way we look for information has changed.
We predict LLMs will act more as reliable dialogue partners, allowing for deeper, intuitive, and contextual access to knowledge. Moreover, this will be supported by the LLMs providing relevant website links where the user can go to verify information.
Prediction#6: Biotech Will Be the Biggest Benefactor of AI
AI’s impact in 2023 was rapid and spanned various industries. While biotech might not have dominated the public conversation, it is one industry that will see AI’s impact the most.
AI’s ability to take complex data and help derive meaningful insights at an unparalleled scale is remarkable. While previous traditional means faced roadblocks, the biotech industry will now take advantage of this event.
For example, in genomics and gene editing, researchers can now analyze complex gene data to identify targets for CRISPR. This can help understand genetic diseases and even map out the impact of gene editing in advance.
The possibilities are endless, so we believe biotech will continue to benefit from AI technology.
More to Come
If 2023 was the year AI captured public attention, 2024 will be the year the technology consolidates and firmly strengthens its presence. This will include breakthroughs in medicine/biotech, new ways to interact with technology through multimodal AI, and much more.
