AI predictions for 2024

We scoured the internet to find all the AI related predictions for 2024 (at least from people that might know what they are talking about), and, in this episode, we talk about some of the common themes. We also take a moment to look back at 2023 commenting with some distance on a crazy AI year. Sponsors: Changelog News https://changelog.com/news – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today https://changelog.com/news. Fly.io https://fly.io/changelog – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog https://fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs https://fly.io/docs/speedrun/. Featuring: Chris Benson – Website https://chrisbenson.com, GitHub https://github.com/chrisbenson, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbenson, X https://x.com/chrisbensonDaniel Whitenack – Website https://www.datadan.io/, GitHub https://github.com/dwhitena, X https://x.com/dwhitenaUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here https://practicalai.fm/webinars!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Welcome to Practical AI. If you work in artificial intelligence, aspire to, or are curious how AI-related tech is changing the world, this is the show for you. Thank you to our partners at fly.io, the home of changelog.com. Fly transforms containers into micro VMs that run on their hardware in 30-plus regions on six continents, so you can launch your app near your users. Learn more at fly.io.

• 0:43Daniel Whitenack?

  Welcome to another episode of Practical AI and Happy New Year 2024. Chris and I are starting out this new year with a fully connected episode, which are those episodes of our podcast where we keep you fully connected with everything that's happening and the AI news and trends and help you level up your machine learning and AI game. I'm Daniel Whitenack. I'm the founder and CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Chris Benson, who is a tech strategist at Lockheed Martin. How are you doing, Chris?

• 1:19Chris Benson?

  I am doing very well, Daniel. Excited for 2024. I suspect, you know, like, we keep talking about how 2023 was just such an amazing year for AI, and we're about to go through some of that, but I'm pretty sure 2024 will be even better.

• 1:34Daniel Whitenack?

  It's interesting. I was just having a conversation with one of my friends and mentors yesterday, and we were talking about the kind of curve of adoption of this technology and where we thought we were in it. He kind of sketched out this trend of... Early days, right, where really what you're investing in is research and development, right? And then there's sort of a usage, expansion, adoption period where what you're investing in is usually developers to actually build out things at scale, right? And then you kind of like reach this place where what you're investing in is lawyers

• 2:19Daniel Whitenack?

  because everything's consolidating and like there's more, you know, regulation, there's a lot of mergers and acquisitions, right? And so everything's kind of consolidating in together. I'm curious to know what your perspective is in terms of, maybe let's scope it to generative AI since that's pretty much what we've, what 2023 was kind of about, and certainly not what all of AI is about.

• 2:45Chris Benson?

  I mean, 2023 was the year that big tech dived into AI for real. Like they had been talking about it and doing it, but it, you know, suddenly the whole world went AI, you know, with chat GPT catching on the way it did and, and its competitors. So big tech is all over it, but there are many challenges to that. And you kind of just talked about that process about working your way through the challenges. And so there hasn't been the killer app, you know? There've been really interesting things to come along and some of them occasionally are revolutionary, a lot of them are revolutionary, but there's still a lot of organizations, a lot of businesses specifically out there trying to figure out, how does this work for us?

• 3:29Chris Benson?

  And there have been some stumbles along the way. So I think, I mean, I think 2024 in that sense is more of the same of investing a lot in AI, not so much for today, but for getting ready for figuring it out for tomorrow. So I think we'll see a lot of, a lot of that, two steps forward, one step back.

• 3:46Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, I kind of had a similar thought. I saw some study, I actually don't remember which one it was off the top of my head, but it was one of those that surveyed a bunch of enterprises or something like that. And it was something like 15 to 20% of. Enterprise companies actually had either kind of something prototyped or some type of integration to an AI system. Maybe that's just a simple integration with an API or something. But if you think about that, there's definitely kind of at that beginning, I would say we're kind of past R and D in the sense that not that R and D is not important and

• 4:29Daniel Whitenack?

  new things will be discovered and as they continually are. But in terms of the technology that has sort of dominated the news cycle in 2023, we're moving past the heavy R and D investments more into the like, how do you scale this with software engineers developments? Like if you're a company developing these technologies, you probably are going to not win by doing R and D. You're going to win by creating, like you say, products, the applications, the platforms, the APIs, the systems that power this kind of growing adoption within the enterprise. So I think where you saw that kind of adoption start

• 5:14Daniel Whitenack?

  in 2023, that's going to expand very rapidly in 2024. And those that keep up with that in terms of actual software and system development will likely be in a good place.

• 5:26Chris Benson?

  Kind of extending that a little bit, another huge trend we saw was in years past, we've talked a lot about the process of doing the R and D and how you're kind of self-hosting or how you're using cloud, but you're still driving it yourself in a lot of ways. And what we're really seeing now is the marketplace for AI integrations is exploding is that these large tech companies, the Microsofts and the Googles and the AWSs, the big cloud companies are really making a lot of AI usage about API usage. And it's AI by API. And I mean, that's essentially Microsoft's entire primary play right now is to take OpenAI technologies

• 6:10Chris Benson?

  and package them up in their own products and push them out. And we're seeing a lot of uptake on that from organizations that maybe Struggled with their R and D a bit in broad, maybe, you know, and I'm not talking about necessarily the leaders in the AI space, you know, the, the most select group, but, but the second, the third tier and the fourth tier companies out there are kind of going, I'll just use what they've made available to us via API. And that's good enough. And a lot of strategy, a lot of business strategy is being built around API access. So it's becoming software, you know, like so much other software.

• 6:43Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. And some of that will likely get more commoditized as other API products have been sort of commoditized over time. And so

• 6:56Chris Benson?

  Open source is coming.

• 6:57Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how people develop their competitive modes within that space in 2024. I think it's a year where probably there'll be some people that really come out ahead and some people that suffer very badly because certain things are just becoming more commoditized.

• 7:20Chris Benson?

  I think you're starting to see companies realize they can't just say we have AI in our product now. You know, we had a period where, you know, having AI, being able to say how we have AI was a marketing ploy unto itself. But as it becomes more ubiquitous and more common, that's not going to work anymore. Your, your point there about differentiation is going to be key and human creativity to find what those opportunities are.

• 7:44Daniel Whitenack?

  I was looking back at some of the developments that happened in 2023 and it's amazing how much was packed into that year. Yeah, some of that I was like, did that really happen? And did that also happen in 2023? It's like,

• 8:00Chris Benson?

  Yeah, it was a year, man.

• 8:02Daniel Whitenack?

  So much was, was packed in. I'm wondering what are some of the, the highlights that you saw in terms of things that happened in 2023 that we either commented on or didn't comment on, or that are kind of highlights in your mind from things that, that we discussed in 2023 that are kind of informing your perspective as we go into 2024?

• 8:25Chris Benson?

  A couple of the the big highlights and we can dive into whatever we want are the tail end of 2022, ChatGPT was released early in 23, I think it was that we had GPT-4, you know, added into that underneath it from from the ChatGPT, I'm sorry, from GPT-3. And then they updated that with 3.5 and that kind of kicked off the firestorm at the beginning of the year. And we saw Google scrambling, you know, to try to catch up. They got barred out and then they came along late in the year with Gemini to back it up. We saw Meta coming out with Lama 2. We saw Anthropic coming out with Claude 2. And so there's now a whole industry, you know, you're going into 2023, there weren't so many options,

• 9:09Chris Benson?

  really. And, you know, ChatGPT kicked off the arms race in the industry. And it's interesting is that I know that for me, as we were going through the year and all these crazy things were happening, it was a new week and a new model to try, you know, and I had my standard tests. I had the things that I cared about, which were usually avoiding the things everybody else was doing. Like, everybody would would ask for Python code for the models. And that's the best language you can possibly ask for. So I would, I would ask for Rust and they were all just, they were all failing all over the place. It was miserable. Like, you could have all these top models and they were doing great in Python, because that's what they were really centered around. But in Rust, they were really falling all over themselves.

• 9:53Chris Benson?

  It's starting to change a little bit now, but that and a few other things.

• 9:57Daniel Whitenack?

  We both may or may not be able to comment on everything that is actually integrated in our daily work. But you as a, as a person, a developer, a strategist, as we went through 2023 and ended up at the end of 2023, your own usage of AI products, what did you?

• 10:19Daniel Whitenack?

  How is it impacting your daily work in ways that were different at the end of 2023 than at the beginning of 2023?

• 10:27Chris Benson?

  I think 2023 was truly the year where I never put down the various, you know, model interfaces.

• 10:35Daniel Whitenack?

  You mean like the chat GPT or Claude or whatever was up in a window, right?

• 10:40Chris Benson?

  Yeah, things like that. Exactly. And now, like, when I open a browser, I have a kind of a bookmarking, you know, app in my Chrome that does it. And all the, across the top of the screen, I have all the models that I use. And on any given day, I probably use every one of those. And often, for a problem, I will go to all those things. So it really became the year that it integrated into every part of my workflow. And it didn't matter if I was coding, or if I was having to write something, and it could be, you know, technical related or not technical related for my animal nonprofit, you know, that I, that I, we talk about occasionally. I use that for that, for a whole bunch of different things. So it

• 11:21Chris Benson?

  wasn't all centered around the AI world or the coding world. It was kind of every aspect. At the dinner table, my daughter, who's 11, she's in sixth grade, and I would challenge her, she'd say, well, my teacher doesn't want me to use that interface. And I kept, I was inevitably saying, well, that teacher's dumb. Because this is part of our life. They need to get used to, you know, this needs to be integrated into teaching instead of being afraid of it or something. But I started showing her how she could learn more, and learn faster by using the tools. And so it was a dinner table thing for us. So that was it. I mean, I'm living the same, this is kind of the same experience that so many other people are, that using these technologies is now completely built into everything that I do, no matter what that activity is, short of swinging a hammer. I think that's the biggest

• 12:06Chris Benson?

  thing for me, is it hit work, it hit side job, the nonprofit, it hit all my personal life, it hit my, my kid's life. And so, anyway, yeah, it's the year that changed me from an AI perspective.

• 12:20Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, that's interesting, because we've been doing this for, what, five years now? And yeah, most of that has certainly been impact from deep learning, machine learning over time in the enterprise setting and value that companies have definitely gained over time with those technologies. But Mostly, it sounds like what you're saying is mostly like you were working in that space and helping develop some of those things, but in terms of the way that you did your job, it wasn't like those things were tightly integrated into your activities. Is that a good way to put it?

• 12:59Chris Benson?

  That's a good way to put it. You know, I had my, I would set aside time to do activities in the space, you know, and that was part of either my day job or us still on the podcast or, or whatever. But those were, and then I would turn away in years prior to 2023. So I think the fact that it didn't just integrate into one of my workflows, it integrated into all of my workflows across all the, all the opportunities there and, and using one against the other and taking the output of one and putting it in the other and things like that, and just trying things out. That's what it was. And I suspect that it was the same for many of our listeners.

• 13:34Daniel Whitenack?

  It's interesting, Chris, that you mentioned impacting kind of your whole family's lives. So one of the things that I did for Christmas, I have a bunch of nieces and nephews and it's always, you know, well, my wife and I don't have kids. A lot of my life isn't dominated by thinking about like what kids are interested in these days. So sometimes it's hard to figure out Christmas gifts and, and all of that. I have to do a good bit of inquiries with my brothers to figure out what to do. But one thing I did this year was I just created like a framed picture. So I, I know each of them have like certain interests, like one's really into electric guitar right now, right? And one of my nieces is really into

• 14:19Daniel Whitenack?

  Frozen or whatever. So taking something from each of those, like took a, you know, an artistic picture of someone shredding guitar on, on stage and then basically deep faked my nephew into the photo and like stylized it with all, I did all that with clip drop from Stability. So like you can go in, you've got like, oh, here's the, I can go in first and just remove the background from the image and then like generate the, the scene, right? And then face swap the thing and then you can clean up certain areas or remove objects or change the lighting and all of that, you know?

• 15:02Daniel Whitenack?

  Happened like very seamlessly for me. So it's just interesting even in that that context. That's what I turned to.

• 15:11Chris Benson?

  You know, it's funny. And I did the same, like a lot, a lot of picture generation and stuff, lots of raccoons and foxes and stuff and in various scenarios. I'll share a two second touching moment that just caught me off guard. I work with a wildlife vet in the animal nonprofit, and they do a lot of stuff for free because we're nonprofit and we're doing all this good and they love these animals. And so they just help. And I'm very thankful for that. But one day I had come home after taking some animals in for them to to help that were beyond my ability. And I just sent him a text saying, thank you. But in the process, I went and, you know, generated an image that showed their veterinary practice and all that, and some animals around it. And I sent it and it was like a two second

• 15:53Chris Benson?

  thing for me. I didn't, it was like, just like, oh, I hope you like this. And they took, they received it, but they're not people in AI. They're not, you know, they, they're not as tech focused, obviously, as we are. And she had it printed out and framed and put in the main office, like where people could see it and everything. And I was just like that. It never occurred to me, but it made me realize that even these completely non tech things, AI is something that can help people that are not focused on AI, still find value in their activities in ways that maybe some of us who are talking about this all the time, don't think about. So yeah, it was kind of an amazing moment to see something that so trivial turn into something that was meaningful for them.

• 16:33Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. And one major change for me, which in the past, so those that have listened to the show for some time, you might be aware that I've always coded in VEM. That's been my IDE of of choice. This was the year that I was finally motivated to, so I actually changed my editor. So I'm using VS Code now.

• 16:59Chris Benson?

  Oh, my, he came over. I can't believe it.

• 17:02Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes, with Codium. So I've tried VS Code in the past. I'm kind of like, okay, cool. Like, I like, there's things like the Searching or completion or function finding stuff, that's all useful, but you can do all that in in Vim easy enough. And I know there's also integrations of AI stuff in Vim, but I found that that really tight workflow and having even a chat interface within VS Code through Codium was actually just like so efficient for me. So I felt like I was able to be way more productive as an individual contributor this year, even in ways that would have been very difficult for me before.

• 17:45Daniel Whitenack?

  So writing like different TypeScript stuff or other things that is not natural for me. I don't know a lot about that, whether it's that screen in VS Code where Codium is or hopping over usually like you, I also have my my chat GPT window up and I'm asking questions back and forth there. So it's kind of a combination of these things. It's not maybe completely seamless, but it's just so efficient. And I love now you kind of saw that progression. It was really powerful for developers, I think this year. And then recently, now you're seeing more privacy conserving

• 18:27Daniel Whitenack?

  options popping up. There's a project called continue.dev or continue. I'm not sure what they prefer, but it's an sort of open source integration of this kind of VS Code type of interface, but with you can choose the model that you want to use. You can integrate an open model like Wizard Coder or Code Llama or something like that. And so I think it's cool that there's a lot of really seamless configuration of that for individual contributors. And I never, the feeling I never got was, oh, this is taking over. What I'm able to do, but by embracing that, I was able to be so much more productive as an individual contributor.

• 19:09Chris Benson?

  I was too. I mean, this year, I'll have periods where I'm coding and I'll have periods where I'm not. And it kind of goes in and out. This was, this year was definitely dip back into coding and there's always the kind of catch up to where you were moment when you've taken time off. But it was different this year because by embracing these tools that we're talking about, it let me catch up and it let me do things that I would have taken time and struggled with before by using all these new amazing tools. So, and, and we're seeing that across so many things. You, you don't have to be a developer to benefit from this. So I think 2024 hopefully will be the year where people discover productivity

• 19:51Chris Benson?

  instead of just kind of entertainment. Cause most of the things I'll see on, you know, Facebook or people that are not really technical and they've discovered how to generate images and stuff like that. And they'll, they'll do that, but they, they haven't learned how to, to really change their lives the way we've been talking about. I'm hoping that that starts to transform folks and takes maybe some of the fear of AI away. Cause that was, that was the other thing I really noticed a lot of this year was fear of AI. I'll walk into a room and I'm ready to talk with anybody about AI and all these cool things. And I kept hitting walls of fear with people who are not in the industry. And every time I did it, it always surprised me. I think I'm just kind of, cause I'm so upbeat

• 20:33Chris Benson?

  about things. That was another thing is maybe 2024 is the year I'm hoping that some of that fear gets mitigated and people discover productivity instead.

• 20:43Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. I mean, there were definitely a good number of things in 2023 that led to a chaotic feel in the industry, whether that be the sort of hiring and firing of Sam Altman or disclosure of like data breaches of one kind or another. We ended the year, of course, with New York Times. I don't know if it was. 2024 or 2023, I'm assuming they had to file things in 2023 where the New York Times is suing OpenAI, which is definitely in the news now for copyright stuff. So yeah, there's a lot of, if those are the soundbites that you're getting,

• 21:25Daniel Whitenack?

  it definitely doesn't lend itself to thinking that this space is reliable and safe and trustworthy.

• 21:33Chris Benson?

  The flip side of the coin on the fear is that this was also the year that we saw significant policy and regulation initiatives being put in place. You know, we had the executive order that came about in the US. Within Europe, they had the AI Act late in the year, and that that made a big difference. And we have talked about a lot of this, by the way, you know, obviously in the show. And I would refer listeners back that many of these things we've discussed here are in, you can find a dedicated episode on some of these things on our show. So look back through that. But in general, as I'd move to, and I mentioned this on a previous episode, move into family or go to and hang out with some folks that had nothing to do with AI. And they don't know what to believe.

• 22:16Chris Benson?

  I saw, I think another thing that got pointed out to me several times is that you'll have, you'll have big names in our industry that are big enough to make it into mainstream. People like, you know, Yann LeCun, he famously considers it ridiculous, you know, that there's fear of AI and stuff like that. And then you had Geoffrey Hinton on the other side, another one of the major names who left Google so that he could talk honestly about the dangers of AI. And so you're talking about two global luminaries in the space that were actually recognized together, you know, recently as pioneers. And yet they have polar opposite views about that. And so if you're, I think that's hard if you're in the industry.

• 22:59Chris Benson?

  But if you're not in the industry, you have a lot of trouble trying to figure out who should you believe when you're, when you get a, you know, a New York Times article or something like that, you know, that addresses these issues and you go, how do I handle that? So I'm hoping that 2024, maybe we can pick up a few new listeners. Maybe some of those that are interested in the topic, but don't work in the industry. But maybe they can get educated a little bit more on kind of what the space looks like.

• 23:27Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, well, thinking about more forward looking things and into 2024. I know we want to talk about some of the maybe. Hot takes or non-hot takes that the people had in making predictions about 2024. Before we do that, I'm wondering, Chris, if you have, I can give mine first, but if you have any, any hot take or spicy opinion that's maybe not represented in kind of the overall, like what everyone is saying. I can give mine first and no worries if you don't have one, but mine, I think that I, I saw a lot of people, you know, posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, here's my predictions for AI in 2024.

• 24:12Daniel Whitenack?

  Mostly all of them having to do with, you know, generative AI and utilizing those models as the key piece of a workflow, which I, I started a company to do this. So I don't disagree that that's going to be a big focus, but maybe my spicy take that's kind of different from many people's is I think that we're going to start to see, there were a couple of takes that I saw that said something about like the software engineering element of, of building out these systems being a key piece of what will be important in 2024, not just making prompts. I would kind of build on that a little bit and, and propose that I think there's going to be some

• 24:57Daniel Whitenack?

  people that are really going to win by combining the kind of, quote, "traditional data science and machine learning algorithms" or models or systems with generative AI systems in a sort of hybridized way. And I say that because in our own client work, I found that to be very much the case. And a very, very powerful approach is, hey, you know, in this case, we're, you know, generating responses for customer emails or something. And I don't want to generate a response when the customer is really frustrated or something.

• 25:39Daniel Whitenack?

  I'd rather a human respond in that case and not the, not the AI, right? Well, The best way to figure that out is, I think, with a sentiment analysis model that we know how to do really, really well, and we can run on a CPU with very little cost, right? And then we can use the generative AI to answer when it makes sense, or maybe even informed by the sentiment label, right? And I think that's only a very simple example, but, you know, combinations of recommender systems, gradient boosting machines, time series analysis with generative AI models, either large language models or other types of generative AI models.

• 26:23Daniel Whitenack?

  I think that's a really powerful combination that many people are kind of ignoring. It's like they've sort of moved on from the past. Now we're in this zone. I kind of have the opinion that we're going to see a little bit more of that kind of make a resurgence in 2024 and be combined in interesting ways or with hybridized systems. You may not see it in the news as much, but I think on the battle lines within enterprises, it's something that you're going to see a lot.

• 26:53Chris Benson?

  I think that's a fantastic, not only a fantastic prediction, but a very practical prediction as well. So you caught me off guard with the word spicy a little bit. There are many predictions I would make, but many of them are fairly mundane in an alignment. They're kind of the logical things. So while you were talking, I kind of wiped all those off the slate because you said, you know, spicy and different. And so I'll, I'll make two. One is I think Prediction Guard is going to really take off in 2024.

• 27:25Daniel Whitenack?

  Let's hope.

• 27:26Chris Benson?

  I'm sure it will. But here's my spicy one. Here's my, because I think that that was just a given. That's inevitable. You've done a great job with that. The spicy one is I think that there is generally going to be a resurgence of interest that we've started to see develop again in 2023 around artificial general intelligence, AGI. And I'll tell you why I'm predicting that. Because we have seen in the past year, these models make such a leap. Depending on how you want to measure what a model is capable of in terms of different measures of intelligence, there's, you know, people talk about there's intelligent, they're

• 28:08Chris Benson?

  super intelligent, they're almost as intelligent. And I think it depends on how, what kind of metric you're using for that. But I think as a generalization, kind of looking at all those, we're seeing these models that are incredibly productive. And if you're measuring intelligence on, in terms of productivity, and you're comparing that against what a human would be able to reasonably do in the same time period, we're seeing output from these models that we've been talking about that's just amazing, which is why you and I have integrated them so heavily into our lives. So if you take that for a moment as a measure of intelligence, and then you say, well, there are about roughly a dozen different ideas on what consciousness and, you know, would be in the space, they don't agree with

• 28:52Chris Benson?

  each other, we've made it nowhere, but there's a lot more fear now. And fear tends to drive priority, as I've learned in the industry that I'm in. And so the general fear out there is when you have such capable models, if there is a worry that we don't understand, we see in nature all around us that consciousness arises in animals all over the place. It's probably mathematical in nature, but we don't have anything. So I think that there will be a resurgence of research. I think that that research will not come in the AI space, it will come in the neuroscience space, trying to understand, because the big fear is what happens when we stumble upon it, and you have already have such productive models.

• 29:32Chris Benson?

  And so I've run into that fear over and over and over during 2023. So I'm predicting, not terribly practically, that there'll be, there'll be a focus, at least in some quarters, about how do we ensure that we don't hit a moment that comes with big surprises in the large. I like that we have very, very different predictions on this one. But that's my spicy prediction.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  This is a changelog news break. Curl creator slash maintainer Daniel Stenberg documents his frustration with recent AI tooling advancements. Quote, "I have held back on writing anything about AI or how we do not use AI for development in the Curl factory. Now I can't hold back anymore. Let me show you the most significant effect of AI on Curl as of today with examples." End quote. Daniel is clearly of the opinion that we haven't gained much of value from generative AI tooling, but he does seem more optimistic about the future than he is about the present. Quote, "I am convinced there will pop up tools using AI for this purpose that actually

• 30:44Speaker 00

  work better in the future, at least part of the time. So I cannot and will not say that AI for finding security problems is necessarily always a bad idea. I do however suspect that if you just add an even so tiny intelligent human check to the mix, the use and outcome of any such tools will become so much better. I suspect that will be true for a long time into the future as well." End quote. My mind is open and willing to be changed, but I'm with Daniel here. The human touch is absolutely necessary today, and I suspect that will remain the case for much longer than some would have us to believe. You just heard one of our five top stories from Monday's changelog news.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Subscribe to the podcast to get all of the week's top stories and pop your email address in at changelog.com/news to also receive our free companion email with even more developer news worth your attention. Once again, that's changelog.com/news.

• 31:46Daniel Whitenack?

  Well, Chris, one of the things that we did leading up to this conversation was take a look at dozens of these. This is what I'm predicting for AI and 2024 posts on Twitter and LinkedIn and kind of crystallized down or distilled down some trends of what people were predicting. So I'm gonna take what I kind of distilled down from all of these posts and I'll just put it out there and we can comment on any of those. Then it may be interesting to look at, you know, a couple of these from specific people that might be interesting because a lot of, a lot of people have been making these predictions. So I did not do this with AI, but if you actually just look through the internet at

• 32:31Daniel Whitenack?

  these posts, you'll, you'll go see some trends pop up of what people are predicting. And I think both you and I looked at these and said, yeah, these are kind of what would be expected to be predicted based on, on what we've seen and the conversations we've had recently. So the common points that were predicted by many different people across the interwebs, I put them in five categories here. So I'll just read them off and then we can make a comment on any of them if you want. So RAG or Retrieval Augmented Generation will continue to be a focus and will experience various improvements. So that's number one.

• 33:13Daniel Whitenack?

  Number two, open models will beat GPT-4 in 2024. Number three, productivity in work will be enhanced by AI rather than replaced by AI. Number four, multimodal models will be more of a focus in 2024. I actually think that was one that I predicted last year when we did our predictions. So maybe I was a year off. So there you go. I was a year off. And then number five, there'll be more focus on small language models rather than large language models because of economic and compute efficiency.

• 33:53Daniel Whitenack?

  So those are the five that were kind of distilled out of a bunch of different Twitter, LinkedIn, blog posts. Any of those strike you as particularly interesting, Chris?

• 34:05Chris Benson?

  I agree with all of them. And these were some of the ones that I disregarded for the spicy one that I made that would probably make half of our audience roll their eyes. But. Maybe all of our audience.

• 34:18Daniel Whitenack?

  What's the good in listening to a podcast if you can't roll your eyes sometimes?

• 34:22Chris Benson?

  If you can't roll your eyes from time to time. But yeah, I think these are all very, very practical, fairly safe predictions. I think that probably most of us that follow the industry closely would tend to say, actually, since they came from many posts, would tend to say that's the thing. And I'm looking forward to that. The multimodal thing in particular is something that I've been waiting for in 2023. I was like, okay, but, okay, but come on. So that, yes, I agree with everyone that's there. And I think that's the logical progression. I would be very surprised if they don't all come true this year.

• 34:59Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, probably a lot of these are given. There's definitely some open models that already quote unquote beat GPT-4 in certain respects, like certain tasks or something like that. Like if you think about maybe generating SQL queries based on a schema, or if you think about like doing this particular thing in this language that's not English, or if you consider like specific domains or other kind of specific tasks. I think you already see that to some degree. Now, GPT-4 is this sort of general purpose model that does all of these things at a pretty incredible level.

• 35:43Daniel Whitenack?

  But I think we'll see open models get much, much closer to that. And you've already seen a lot of that kind of being hinted at with models like Mixtral from Mistral, which is a mixture of experts model similar to, in that sense, mixture of experts sense to GPT-4.

• 36:04Chris Benson?

  And I think we're already kind of seeing a lot of that happening. You know, to your point, if GPT-4 remains king at the moment, it's not king in everything. And different taskings work better. There are some things I found Llama 2 does the best at. There are things I found this Gemini, which is still quite new, just a few weeks old from its release is good. I think right now I'm getting better rust out of Gemini than any of the others. And so that's one of those things where we're kind of learning what model to go to for different tasks. With GPT-4 probably having the best overall return rate in a generalized sense still. But that will certainly change this year. It will probably change multiple times.

• 36:50Daniel Whitenack?

  I found some of the comments on specific ones of these interesting from particular people that are especially well positioned to comment on some of these items. So for example, the number five one, the focus on small language models, but also with the perspective of becoming more economical and cost and compute efficient. Clem from Hugging Face, the CEO, made a video which is really nice. I recommend everyone watch that on Twitter or other places that it's posted. But he made some comments about his prediction that one of the hyped AI companies,

• 37:34Daniel Whitenack?

  certainly a lot of them now, would go bankrupt in 2024 or get acquired for a low price. And he tied that in with the comments along the lines of cost efficiency and focusing on cost of running these models. Because yeah, you likely have a lot of startups that have raised big money. Their compute costs are probably astronomical because they're running these large models at scale and hoping that their margins get better over time. But once you make the shift to open models and cost efficient models, that may not work out in their favor.

• 38:18Daniel Whitenack?

  And so the ability for people to run models in their own infrastructure, run more cost efficient models, that's not going to play out well for certain people. But it will play out well generally for the costs of running these sorts of systems and enterprises, whether that be, it still could be a software system that runs LLMs and is self hosted within an enterprise. But it's going to be much more cost efficient to do that, especially kind of for those that are wanting to. Pull some of that in, not rely on external systems, be more privacy conserving, not have data leave their infrastructure. That's going to become more and more possible.

• 38:59Daniel Whitenack?

  And so, um, yeah, I was, I thought it was interesting how Clem tied together some of these, of his predictions around, yes, being more cost and compute efficient, which is a benefit to the climate for those that are thinking about those things, but also cost efficient in terms of enterprise and operational costs and how the focus on that will not work out that great for certain of these kind of hyped AI plays.

• 39:28Chris Benson?

  Kind of as a follow-up to that, I saw, it was a few days ago, and I'm going to paraphrase because I don't have it in front of me, but he did a social media post that basically was an appeal to teams out there and saying, listen, if this year you're at the end of your financial run and you want to keep doing the work and you want to keep your team together, reach out to us at Hugging Face and maybe, maybe you can join our team and keep doing, uh, some of the same stuff in that way. And, you know, with our, with our infrastructure. So I think, and which, which I think is a very, um, natural follow-up to him pointing out that, that we'd see some crashing and burning otherwise, uh, in there. So, and, and a smart move on his part as a CEO.

• 40:10Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, it's great to see that. I think there will be some of that, some of the hints of that this year. I, I don't think we're in that sort of like higher lawyers and consolidate phase yet. We're still in that kind of building and engineering phase, but just the economics of how things are shifting will, will shift, I think in, in 2024, which will be interesting.

• 40:34Chris Benson?

  Yeah, I think it'll be, the finances of it all will matter going for, instead of just building and building, you will see a, a building, but a building with a practical eye on how do we sustain this over time. So.

• 40:46Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, for sure. And I know one of the other ones that I think is very well positioned to make a comment on the things that he was making a comment on is, uh, Jerry from Lama Index, who was on the show.

• 41:01Chris Benson?

  Yep.

• 41:02Daniel Whitenack?

  Well, Clem was on the show too, but Jerry more recently. Uh, and of course, uh, Lama Index is one of the key frameworks that's being used within RAG workflows. And he also made one of the comments around. The way he phrased it, as every AI engineer still needs to have strong software engineering fundamentals. So shipping, this is quoting him, shipping an LLM app to production reduces to software engineering and clean, extensible abstractions, testability, monitoring and production, et cetera. So yeah, I think that that insight is very fair and kind of gets to this really need for

• 41:44Daniel Whitenack?

  software development practices to kind of gather around the LLM practices and model calls within 2024.

• 41:55Chris Benson?

  So I'm glad that you brought that up. Just as a quick add on to that, we've seen a lot of kind of AI specific language around, you know, producing AI capabilities and such as that. But, uh, you know, a lot of phrases have been coined in that way. I think that's important is that at the end of the day, AI remains a really cool new capability within the larger software space. And to do anything with it, you have to have a software capability and that those two are gradually merging. And someday, when we're past the kind of the the coolness of the AI and we're all just like, oh, yes, it's we've been doing this for a while. And it's not quite such a big deal.

• 42:37Chris Benson?

  It'll be software again and all software will have it and it will just be another aspect of software. We're not there yet. We're very much in the cool space at this point, but software skills remain important. And some of those may be human driven and some of those may be driven by the software with models. But that doesn't change going forward. You're still going to need it.

• 42:57Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to learning with you in 2024, Chris, and talking through whatever comes, which will certainly be different than what we just predicted. As is always the case every year that we try to do this, it's always different. But I am looking forward to navigating that journey. And, um, thank you to our listeners for being loyal and engaged in 2023 and really happy to continue bringing you this content.

• 43:27Daniel Whitenack?

  And learning with you all as well in 2024. If you haven't yet, make sure you go to changelog.com/community. You can join a Slack channel where you can chat with us if you like and connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn and and all the places where

• 43:44Chris Benson?

  Blue Sky.

• 43:45Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, exactly. Blue Sky. And we'll we'll love to hear guests that you want on the show or topics that you want discussed and chat with you about all the cool stuff that that you're doing. So thanks for a great 2023 and Happy New Year 2024.

• 44:01Chris Benson?

  Happy New Year to you too and everyone listening.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  All right, that is Practical AI for this week. Subscribe now if you haven't already. Head to practicalai.fm for all the ways and join our free Slack team where you can hang out with Daniel, Chris, and the entire change log community. Sign up today at practicalai.fm/community. Thanks again to our partners at fly.io, to our beat freaking residents, Breakmaster Cylinder, and to you for listening. We appreciate you spending time with us. That's all for now. We'll talk to you again next time.