2024 in Review: What I got right (and wrong)

We're gonna reflect on 2024 predictions. Tis the season after all. I'll make some predictions next week, no worries 😜

Thing 1 - 2024 predictions in review

Let's see how my 2024 predictions fared.

Prediction: GPT-5 drops and becomes the top model, stays undefeated for most of the year (or until GPT-6)

❌ Not quite.
We didn't get GPT-5. Instead we got o1 and o1 pro. So I'd say it happened in spirit, not in the name

Prediction: Open Source GPT-4 Equivalent (equivalent on evals)

✅ Happened.
Models like Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2 beat GPT-4 on (some) benchmarks. Also recent DeepSeek-V3.

Prediction: Transformer architecture on-chip starts hitting the market - designated chips for LLM inference

✅ Happened.
Groq LPU Inference Engine, Expedera Origin E1 LittleNPU hit the market, and others were announced and/or prototyped.

Prediction: Humanoid robots become available for purchase - cost as much as a car

✅ Happened.
Though it's still a bit hard to buy them. We're early, I expected we'd be further along, even if it technically happened. Hardware is hard, it's in the name.
Unitree G1 is listed starting from US$16k and Unitree H1 starting from US$90k.
Figure 01 works at BMW.

Prediction: AI agents become publicly/commercially available

✅ Happened.
Replit Agent ($20/m), Cursor Agent ($20/m), Devin AI ($500/m) and others...

Prediction: Ads make it to the outputs of large language models

✅ Happened.
Ads started appearing in the output of the free version of Microsoft Copilot. I've seen them. Seems like a short-lived experiment (for now).

Prediction: Informative content (and learning) starts becoming more of an interactive experience than passive consumption (due to LLMs, Bard integration with YouTube, perplexity.ai... and VR/AR)

✅ Happened.
Duolingo Max got "Explain My Answer" and "Roleplay" features.
Synthesis Tutor teaches kids math, kids love it and blast through years of school curriculum in weeks.

Prediction: Feature film with AI-only content goes viral

🤔 Happened, kinda.
There's been a few indie short films that got millions of views on social media. But also Coca-Cola released an AI-generated holiday ad which got significant attention

Prediction: Apple becomes one of the major players in the GenAI space (and AI in general) - I expect them to allow users to run them locally on M3 and M4 chips

🤔 Happened, kinda.
Apple launched Apple Intelligence, but it kinda flopped. They didn't become a major player with it (yet).
BUT, while Apple has not led this initiative, users can run open-source AI models on Apple Silicon. Developers have leveraged Apple's hardware to run models like Llama 3.1 locally, enhancing privacy and efficiency

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• Alibaba dropped Qwen QVQ 72B-preview that beats GPT-4o on several benchmarks (MMMU, MathVista, MathVision, OlympiadBench)

• xAI announced Series C of $6B in funding. They'll use it to build the worlds largest AI supercomputer doubling the size to 200.000 GPUs, among other things
• Hume introduced Octave - frontier speech-language model with new emergent capabilities, like on-the-fly voice and personality creation
• Arizona approved an educational initiative where an online charter school, Unbound Academy, will deliver its entire curriculum through artificial intelligence (AI), eliminating traditional teachers from the classroom environment. There will still be teachers and they'll be there for a regular length day. But teachers will no longer teach.

Thing 3 - Focus with Purpose and Justice

Concentrate every minute on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice.

- Marcus Aurelius

In case you haven't picked your new year's resolution, this is a good one.

Cheers, Zvonimir