The year 2023 passed under the sign of AI and everything indicates that nothing will change in this respect in the next one. But what exactly can we expect? And what other trends will take over the world in 2024? Let's look into the future, based on data and official announcements.
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The year 2023 was a breakthrough for generative artificial intelligence. When Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, saw the capabilities of the large language model GPT-4 during a private demonstration, he stated that the entire company must change its course by 180 degrees, with AI being the goal. Collaboration with OpenAI and introducing a chatbot to the Bing search engine or implementing Copilot brand services into the world's most popular office suite, MS Office, are just the beginning of these changes. Microsoft is currently investing $50 billion in data centers for artificial intelligence - more than the entire annual research and development budget of Alphabet or Apple. All this to not miss the next technological transformation, as Microsoft missed the smartphone revolution.
AI has also become a priority for other companies from the big five, especially for Google, which recently presented a completely new Gemini language model, theoretically capable of competing with the strongest GPT-4 Turbo model from OpenAI. Meta also intends to focus on AI and move away from the metaverse it has been promoting so far. So what trends in the field of artificial intelligence can we expect in 2024?
The first trend that is likely to develop is individual versions of AI, tailored to specific needs. OpenAI has made it possible to create so-called GPTs, i.e., individualized versions of ChatGPT, enriched with an individual corpus of knowledge. In 2024, there will be more and more specialized chatbots for specific tasks.
For example, a legal chatbot that contains general knowledge of American law enriched with a corpus of knowledge on a specific topic, such as labor law, to become an expert on a specific topic. You can already get a taste of this direction of individualized chatbots using the Polish project czat.ai, based on the best language model ChatGPT-4 Turbo, incomparably better than the free version of ChatGPT, based on the GPT-3.5 model.
The next trend is the proliferation of language models in an increasing number of "editions", including those that do not require internet access. These so-called "nano" models can operate on local devices without network access and significantly improve their work. Google presented one of the first models of this type - Gemini Nano will soon allow, for example, to prepare a text summary of an audio recording. Apple is also heading in a similar direction.
In the case of large language models (LLM), the key is the dataset on which a given model is trained. Colloquially speaking, in the learning process, the LLM swallows publicly available content from the internet supplemented with organized sets of information, such as an archive of scientific journals. Then all this enormous knowledge, containing hundreds of billions of parameters, is transformed into a language model. Unfortunately, the most well-known and useful models are primarily trained in English.
Hence, there are more and more initiatives to create national models. And just such a Polish model will be created in cooperation with NASK and five other research units. PLLuM is to be trained primarily on data in Polish and, very importantly, it is to be an open model, so everyone will be able to fully and without restrictions use its capabilities, creating various solutions based on it.
However, the year 2024 will not only be marked by the very dynamic development of artificial intelligence systems, but also attempts to regulate them. The pioneer here is the European Union, which was the first in the world to agree on the text of a law regulating the use of AI, defining, among other things, what high-risk AI implementations are. Similar regulations can also be expected in other parts of the world.
The year 2024 will be an election year for more than 2 billion people from over 70 countries around the world. Elections will also take place in the United States, where citizens will decide who will become their next president. And we can be sure that generative artificial intelligence will play a key role in the upcoming campaign - not necessarily a positive one. Experts already expect disinformation on an unprecedented scale, because generating fake photos and audio recordings has never been as easy as it is now.
The past year leaves no doubt that artificial intelligence is a breakthrough technology. Therefore, in 2024, we can only expect acceleration and domination of AI solutions, which will be entering more and more areas of our lives.
We also know today that the year 2024 will be marked by AR and VR, that is, augmented and virtual reality. All this thanks to the Vision Pro device presented by Apple in June 2023.
Despite the excitement of the entire technology industry with virtual and augmented reality, it never really made it into homes. In October 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta and since then has officially focused on virtual reality, but consumers have never been convinced by it. VR goggles from the Meta Quest series have never gone beyond the niche of computer gamers. It is estimated that about 20 million units have been sold since 2019, compared to nearly 50 million PlayStation 5 units, which have been on the market for over a year less. The popularity of Quest cannot be compared to smartphones - Apple alone sold over 225 million iPhones in 2022 alone.
That's why the entire technology industry will focus on this company in March 2024, when the aforementioned Apple Vision Pro will have its premiere. According to several American experts who had the opportunity to test the device, if Apple fails to create a market for AR and VR, no one else will. And the chances are there, because according to those testing Vision Pro, the device is groundbreaking and completely changes the way computers are used - it enters the era of so-called spatial computing. This is also the term used by Apple when talking about Vision Pro.
Users of Vision Pro will be able to select interface elements with eye movements alone, communicate with it using voice, and confirm their choices with a single hand gesture. And all this supposedly works perfectly, almost magically. The image quality is so good that you don't feel eye fatigue, and in augmented reality mode, virtual world objects blend perfectly with the real world. Those who had the opportunity to test Vision Pro confirm that the overall experience of using the device is exceptionally good, incomparable to anything that has been available so far.
But will this be enough to convince consumers to wear a helmet that shows people around the projection of the wearer's eyes, displayed on a liquid crystal screen? The price of the device - $3,500 - suggests that it is not aimed at ordinary consumers, but at enthusiasts, geeks and software developers, and how Vision Pro is received will determine the future of the AR/VR industry.
We also know that in 2024 Twitter, renamed by Elon Musk to X, will face increasing competition. Launched in July 2023, the Meta Threads service had 100 million users five days after its premiere, even though it was only launched in the European Union in mid-December. In the field of microblogging services, decentralized Mastodon and BlueSky, founded by Jack Dorsey, the creator of the original Twitter, are also making their mark, with over 2 million active users.
X, with over 528 million active users per month, seems theoretically invulnerable, but the subsequent controversial actions and behaviors of Elon Musk do not help the service. Recently, the billionaire sparked huge controversy with his response to an anti-Semitic post and a vulgar term towards advertisers, which led to their mass exodus from the platform. The year 2024 will certainly be marked by a series of question marks concerning X.com, and the two most important ones are: will the platform maintain its primacy? And will it survive another year?
Of course, this is a subjective selection of the most important, in the author's opinion, technological trends in 2024, only those about which we already have a number of confirmed information today. And the most interesting will probably be those things that no one expects today, like the premiere of ChatGPT in December 2022.
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