AI predictions for 2024

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0:42Welcome 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 PredictionGuard 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? 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.

1:35It'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 were 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. And then you reach this place where what you're investing in is lawyers because everything's consolidating and there's more regulation.

2:24There's a lot of mergers and acquisitions. And so everything's 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 but 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 GBT 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.

3:10And so there hasn't been the killer app, you know, uh, 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 and there have been some stumbles along the way. So 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 that, two steps forward, one step back. Yeah, I kind of had a similar thought.

3:49I 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 &D in the sense that not that R &D is not important and new things will be discovered and as they continually are.

4:32But in terms of the technology that has sort of dominated the new cycle in 2023, we're moving past the heavy R &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 &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 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.

5:25Kind 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 &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. You know, it's AI by API. And I mean, that's essentially Microsoft's entire, you know, primary play right now is to take open AI technologies and package them up in their own products and push them out.

6:14and we're seeing a lot of uptake on that from organizations that that maybe struggled with their r &d a bit uh 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 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 yeah and some of that will likely get more commoditized as other api products have been sort of commoditized uh over time and so open source is coming yeah it'll be interesting to see how people develop their competitive moats within that space in 2024.

7:06I 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. I think you're starting to see companies realize they can't just say we have AI in our product now. We had a period where having AI, being able to say we have AI was a marketing ploy into itself. But as it becomes more ubiquitous and more common, that's not going to work anymore. Your point there about differentiation is going to be key and human creativity to find what those opportunities are. I was looking back at some of the developments that happened in 2023.

7:50And 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, yeah, it was a year, man. So much was packed in. I'm wondering what are some of 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 we discussed in 2023 that are kind of informing your perspective as we go into 2024? A couple of the big highlights, and we can dive into whatever we want, are at the tail end of 2022, chat GPT was released early in 23.

8:35I think it was that we had GPT-4 added into that underneath it from the chat GPT. 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 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 Llama 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 really. And, you know, ChatGPT kicked off the arms race in the industry.

9:14And 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 and i 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 like you could have all these top models and they were doing great in Python because that's what they were really centered around.

9:50But in Rust, they were really falling all over themselves. It's starting to change a little bit now, but that and a few other things. We both may or may not be able to comment on everything that is actually integrated in our daily work. But you 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 how was it impacting your daily work in ways that were different at the end of 2023 than at the beginning of 2023 i think 2023 was truly the year where where i never put down the various uh you know model interfaces you mean like the chat GPT or cloud or whatever was up in a window right 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.

11:06And 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 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 um 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 and instead of being afraid of it or something but i started showing her how she could learn more i didn't learn faster by using the tools and so it was a dinner table thing for us so um that was it i mean i'm living the same this 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.

12:05I think that's the biggest thing for me is it hit work, it hit side job, the nonprofit, it hit all my personal life, uh, hit my, my kid's life. And so anyway, yeah, it's the year that changed me from an AI perspective. 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.

12:58Is that a good way to put it? That's a good way to put it. I would set aside time to do activities in the space, and that was part of either my day job or still on the podcast or whatever. 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, integrated into all of my workflows across all the opportunities there 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.

13:34It's interesting, Chris, that you mentioned impacting kind of your whole family's life. 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 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 know each of them have like certain interests, like one's really into electric guitar right now.

14:15Right. And one of my nieces is really into 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 uh clip drop uh 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 happened like very seamlessly for me so it's just interesting even in that that context that's what I turn to you know it's funny um 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 uh scenarios um 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.

15:35And I'm very thankful for that. But one day I had come home after taking some animals in for them to help that were beyond my ability. And I just sent them a text saying thank you. But in the process, I went and 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 thing for me. I didn't, it was like, just like, oh, I hope you like this. And they took, they, they received it, but they're not people in AI. They're not, you know, they, uh, they're not as tech focused, obviously as we are. And she had it, uh, printed out and framed and put in the main office, like where people could see it and everything.

16:10And I was just like, that never occurred to me, but it made me realize, um, 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. 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 Vim. That's been my IDE of choice.

16:51This was the year that I was finally motivated to. So I actually changed my editor. So I'm using VS Code now. Oh my, he came over. I can't believe it. Yes, with Codium. So I've tried VS Code in the past. I'm kind of like, okay, cool. There's things like the searching or completion or function finding stuff that that's all useful but you can do all that and in them easy enough and i know there's also integrations of ai stuff in in them 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.

17:46So 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 and VS code where Codium is or hopping over. Usually like you, I also have 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 options popping up. There's a project called continue.dev or continue.

18:32you. 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 you can choose the model that you want to use. You can integrate an open model like WizardCoder or CodeLlama 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 the 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. I was too. I mean, this year, I'll have periods where I'm coding and I'll have periods where I'm not.

19:15And it kind of goes in and out. This year was definitely dipped 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. And we're seeing that across so many things. 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 instead of just kind of entertainment.

19:53because most of the things I'll see on Facebook are people that are not really technical and they've discovered how to generate images and stuff like that and they'll do that, but they haven't learned how 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 because 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.

20:28Every time I did it, it always surprised me. I think I'm just kind of, because I'm so upbeat 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. 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 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.

21:20So yeah, there's a lot of, if those are the sound bites that you're getting, it definitely doesn't lend itself to thinking that this space is reliable and safe and trustworthy. 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. We had the executive order that came about in the U.S. Within Europe, they have the AI Act late in the year, and that made a big difference. And we have talked about a lot of this, by the way, 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.

22:05So 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. I saw it. Another thing that got pointed out to me several times is that you'll have big names in our industry that are big enough to make it into mainstream. People like, you know, Jan LeCun. He famously considers it ridiculous, you know, that there's fear of AI and stuff like that. And then you had Jeffrey 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.

22:41And 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, 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.

23:27Yeah. 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 saw a lot of people posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, here's my predictions for AI in 2024. Mostly all of them having to do with generative AI and utilizing those models as the key piece of a workflow, which I started a company to do this.

24:23So 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 gonna 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 proposed that I think there's going to be some 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.

25:16And I say that because in our own client work, I found that to be very much the case in 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. I'd rather a human respond in that case and 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?

26:03And 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. 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 i think that's a fantastic then not only a fantastic prediction but a very practical uh 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 thing so while you were talking uh i kind of wiped all those off the slate because uh because you said you know spicy and different and so i'll uh i'll make two i i one is i think prediction guard is gonna really take off in 2024 let's hope i'm sure it will but uh here's my spicy one here's my uh 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 uh generally going to be a resurgence of interest that we've started to see develop again in 2023 around artificial general intelligence, AGI.

27:50And 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, people talk about they're as intelligent, they're super intelligent, they're almost as intelligent. And I think it depends on 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 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.

28:38So 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 would be in the space. They don't agree with 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.

29:16So 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. 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 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.

30:00this 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 work better in the future, at least part of the time.

30:47So 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.

31:25Subscribe to the podcast to get all of the week's top stories and pop your email address in at changelog.com slash news to also receive our free companion email with even more developer news worth your attention. Once again, that's changelog.com slash news.