Almost Timely News: 🗞️ A Quick 2024 AI Recap (2024-12-29)
Almost Timely News: 🗞️ A Quick 2024 AI Recap (2024-12-29) :: View in Browser
The Big Plug🚍 Download my new 2025 Marketing and AI Trends Report! Content Authenticity Statement100% of this week's newsletter was generated by me, the human. Learn why this kind of disclosure is a good idea and might be required for anyone doing business in any capacity with the EU in the near future. Watch This Newsletter On YouTube 📺 Click here for the video 📺 version of this newsletter on YouTube » Click here for an MP3 audio 🎧 only version » What's On My Mind: A Quick 2024 AI RecapAs the calendar winds down to the final days of 2024, let's take a look back at the year that was - and what a year it was. If 2023 was the year people figured out generative AI existed (ChatGPT really started to gain presence of mind in January of 2023), 2024 was the year of mass adoption of AI for everything, even things that generative AI is really bad at (like math). So what happened? Let's look at the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Good: A World Without LimitsAI models - generative models based on the transformers and diffusers architectures that make text, audio, video, and interactive media - advanced at a faster pace in 2024 than any technology I've ever seen in my lifetime. We saw a decade of growth in a year as tech companies around the world battled it out to set the standard for AI capabilities.
All these announcements, all this progress creates a world in which the major limitations on what you can do with generative AI are your ideas and your patience. If you have the time to learn how to use each of the major tools and models, there are no practical limits to what you can do with generative AI. We've gained so many capabilities this year. At the beginning of the year, we couldn't generate music that was even moderately coherent. At the beginning of the year, we could use generative AI to do all the basic tasks, but advanced tasks like massive coding projects were out of reach. At the beginning of the year, we couldn't generate hundreds of high quality images a day just on our laptops. We end the year with these capabilities and so much more, from realtime interaction with the physical world to advanced coding, mathematics, and developmental capabilities. It's hard to even remember what was and wasn't possible at the beginning of the year because so much has changed so quickly. Shameless plug, this is my theme for my 2025 keynote, if you'd like me to bring it to your kickoffs and events. The Bad: A World Without Resources2024 wasn't all sunshine and roses. A lot of things happened in AI that weren't so great. Energy consumption was off the charts, something documented by many news outlets during the year. OpenAI's new experimental model, o3, consumes more electricity for a high efficiency task than an entire single family home uses in 3 days. For its low efficiency tasks, it consumes more electricity than a single family home uses in a year and a half. Every query, every prompt, every action we take with generative AI consumes electricity and fresh water (which is used to cool data centers). Massive facilities around the globe are consuming so much power that major tech companies are looking at building nuclear reactors just to power data centers. The antidote there is to distribute the load; local models that run on your devices use much less power, so for simple tasks like rewriting, outlining, etc., it's incumbent upon us all to use the smallest AI we can, saving the heavy lifting for big models and big data centers where we can't muster enough compute power ourselves. In 2025, I'll be teaching this in workshops, how to set up and run local AI. Generative AI is starting to be felt in employment. Software developers in particular had a very rough year, in part because generative AI is so capable, a single developer using AI tools can do 2-5x the amount of work as a developer without access to AI. What this leads to is reduction in demand; companies don't need to hire new developers to see massive productivity gains. They can get more work product out of the developers they have, someting we see in the hiring demand data this year, via Indeed.com. In fact, many knowledge work jobs saw demand decline over the last two years and stay low - including marketing.
This is probably not going to get better. The Ugly: A World Without TrustThat brings us to the ugly - the ways AI is eroding trust. Hallucinations are a part of how models work, something we've talked about extensively in the past. There's no getting around them - you can mitigate them, but they'll never be fully hallucination-proof (and neither are you and I). But naive use of AI is generating massive amounts of untrustworthy content in almost every environment. For example, AI Overviews and AI-enabled search are changing how we find and consume information. We're leaving Google and AI search engines less and less. Rand Fishkin (of Sparktoro and Moz fame) pointed out recently that Google in particular is now keeping around 60% of its traffic that it used to refer to other sites. How? With things like AI Overviews. Consumers using Google Search don't have to leave. They get the summarized answer they need and move on with their day. But the summarized answer may not be any good. It's only as good as the sources it's drawing from, and in a fair number of cases, those sources may be questionable - like Reddit. Bigger than that, the sheer amount of AI-generated content in every domain is increasing rapidly. That isn't necessarily a bad thing by itself, but if humans are not doing a great job of proof-reading and correcting AI output, then they could be publishing things that are factually wrong. In a paper from April 2024, a Stanford University team estimated anywhere from 6.3% to 17.5% of all published academic papers were machine generated. How carefully those papers are being reviewed for factual accuracy is unknown, and therein lies the problem. We see this every day. Spend more than 5 minutes on the social network of your choice and you will see a flood of AI generated content. Some of it's harmless and silly, like my post the other day featuring a rutabaga sitting on the throne of England. Much of it is obnoxious, like the infestation of comment bots on networks like LinkedIn ("Insightful post {your name}. {Two sentence trivial recap of your post adding nothing new} 🚀"). All of it makes us wonder what's real and what isn't, what had human origination or supervision, and what is just machinery operating independent of supervision. Pete Buttagieg, the current US Secretary of Transportation and one-time presidential candidate, talked recently about how photography - the gold standard of evidence in things like criminal trials for more than a century - is now unreliable in court thanks to image generation models that are so fluent, they can easily fake a crime scene. And we saw widespread, scaled use of generative AI over the last year, from robocalls made with Eleven Labs' voice cloning to deepfake videos of London mayor Sadiq Khan. The Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence logged nearly 500 incidents of AI-generated political content this year - and that's just what was visible and/or reported. The WrapupPutting this all together, 2024 was the year generative AI finally and truly hit the mainstream, but it's still incredibly early. The leading brand, ChatGPT, finally saw more sustained search volume on an ongoing basis than Taylor Swift did, in the latter half of this year, which is as good a benchmark as any.
But our use of these tools and unlocking their capabilities really is in the terrible twos. Collectively, we haven't figured out how to use these incredible powers. We're like Clark Kent the first day he jumped as a kid in Smallville and learned he could fly, then promptly crashed face first into a barn. As we look ahead, 2025 and beyond will be less dictated by the technologies themselves (though I expect we will see the arms race for AI capabilities continue at a furious pace, especially from model makers like Alibaba Cloud and Meta) and more about what we do with them, how we use them, how we bring them to life with practical use cases. There are still plenty of people using ChatGPT like it's 2023, and plenty of people who haven't even heard of it yet. We can expect it to be, as I often call it, the amplifier that it is. Paraphrasing the Captain America movie, it will make the good into better and the bad into worse. Companies that are profit-focused above all else will use AI to fire as many people as they can, as quickly as they can, to boost margins. Generative AI will dramatically increase income inequality and concentration of wealth in technology companies. But it will also spur more creativity and more creative output from people who have creative ideas. It will democratize things like film-making, allowing more people to create more, different content that suits niche audiences who struggle to get any funding for their ideas. It will make us more ourselves, amplifying all the good and bad that is humanity. How that plays out is up to us, next year and every year. Happy holidays and happy new year to you. How Was This Issue?Rate this week's newsletter issue with a single click. Your feedback over time helps me figure out what content to create for you. Here's The UnsubscribeIt took me a while to find a convenient way to link it up, but here's how to get to the unsubscribe.
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