It seems this question is on the mind of many:

What is happening with AI in 2024?

Ian Ozsvald who organises Pydata London and writes over at Not A Number (highly recommended), phrased this very interestingly:

Thinking of Generative AI within the next 1 year, suggest something Possible, something Plausible and something Probable.

As my brain works, I immediately gravitated to some damning predictions, so I extended it!

One positive and one negative.

Probable

Positive: Code-tools like Copilot progress to the point where they can take over most of the "grunt work" on the limited generative task of "code logic". The hard part was always conceptualising the system that the code is running in, and code chatbots (like Copilot Chat in beta right now) will increase the code quality and make documentation a breeze.

Negative: The Spampocalypse. Believable-looking and sounding emails and Reddit posts are nothing. Videos with cloned influencers promoting trash. Content mills churning out whatever trite trash they think gets clicks. This goes hand in hand with more believable phishing attacks.

Plausible

Positive: Instead of these massive data-hungry LLMs and distillation, we'll get a new type of model that has limited reasoning capability. Could be Bayesian, more like some sort of causal inference that points X -> Y and is hailed as the solution for hallucinations. It won't be, but it will make for more efficient training paradigms.

Negative: Legislation will fall to the siren call of longtermism and regulate "a possible future AGI", listening to the main hypemen in private AI development, which will negatively impact the current real-world impact genAI has on marginalised communities (be it environment or direct through biases).

Possible

Positive: A generative model will run on robotics hardware and create something that is aesthetically mind-blowing. There will probably be hacks involved. Like OpenAI showing the Rubik's cube solving hand, which wasn't taught from scratch. But it will bring generative AI into the physical world.

Negative: We had the enshittification of social media. So it's entirely possible that these impressive but expensive models get hamstrung and monetised. Capitalism might get us all, and Google possibly has people asking the question "How can we sell ads in a Bard generative output?". The slow-marching grip of capitalism will get us all in the end.

Bonus predictions

But I kinda wanted to add some bonus predictions:

• The EU will force tech companies to invest into unlearning tech so that you can tell Meta to forget your data. Tech will basically exclude you from their services if you do.
• A bunch of small firms will push into genAI, just like into data science, without even having a use case.
• Coincidentally, a bunch of companies will have their secrets leaked due to a lack of LLM security.
• Even the most sophisticated models behind a paywall still have to do significant postprocessing to get faces, text, and fingers right 100% of the time.

But those are basically just one step ahead, so easy predictions!

What are your predictions for AI in 2024?