Clues Say Generative AI’s Future Will Be Revealed in 2024

To Zuckerberg and Altman: Alea Iacta Est

This article is a selection from The Algorithmic Bridge, an educational project aimed at bridging the gap between AI and people.

2024 is a special year for generative AI but for different reasons than the 2020–2023 period.

If I had to choose a word to define the previous years, I’d say growth.

In just four years, generative AI has been transformed from an abstract wish into a heterogeneous space that involves many types of companies working in synergy: model makers like OpenAI, data labelers like Scale AI, hardware vendors like Nvidia, device innovators like Rabbit, and narrow services built on top of language models like Jasper.

All of them pursue the same goal in one way or another: establishing generative AI as a respectable and mature industry.

Although some people defied the premise that generative AI was useful at all, almost no one denied it was a new thing on which we could place high expectations. We expected growth and we had growth. At the level of both research and products (just try to count the number of published worthwhile papers or founded AI startups).

So it’s growth that best defines the early period of the generative AI explosion, which goes from OpenAI’s GPT-3 in June 2020 (even GPT-2 in 2019 if we stretch it a little) to Google DeepMind’s Gemini in December 2023.

This one will also be a year of growth, of course, but it won’t be growth that’ll define it the best. We’re entering a new phase and a more appropriate word is required.

2024 will be the year of revelations.

Is GPT-4 just too good or the best we can get?

2023 began with a surprise. OpenAI’s GPT-4 was much better than anything else.

It ended with another — of opposite sentiment: The long-awaited Google DeepMind’s Gemini was not that much better than GPT-4 (for some people, it was even slightly inferior and only appeared to be better due to benchmark shenanigans).

The reason for both surprises was, interestingly, the same: GPT-4 is 2022 tech.