What we may see in 2024

A few days late into 2024, but here it goes. A couple of thoughts (in no particular order) on what I think we may see over the next 12 months.

1) It’ll be a big year for consumer hardware.

• The Vision Pro launch will be a success for Apple and the immersive/3D space as a whole. More venture dollars will begin to flow into VR, spatial computing, whatever you want to call it.

  • Many skeptics will change their mind after giving the device a go. Many will continue to believe that the existing form factor of phones/PCs will remain.

  • First killer use cases imo: extended virtual monitors, watching stuff on planes, watching stuff in bed while your SO is sleeping.

  • Low supply (and high price point) for the Vision Pro will drive huge demand for the Quest 3. Meta will be the real short/mid term beneficiary of the launch.

  • Device adoption and positive reception will lead more founders to start companies in the space -> dev tools for 3D and naturally many end-user apps across social, dating, entertainment, fitness/wellbeing and productivity.

• We’ll see multiple new consumer AI hardware products launch. Too early to tell if these gen 1 products will see big commercial successes but they will certainly pave the way for highly refined gen 2s and 3s.

  • Between Meta’s Smart Glasses, the @Humane Pin, Tab, @RewindAI's Pendant, etc we’ll see an entire new line of consumer AI hardware products hit the market. Unclear what the first killer use cases will be. But there will be plenty (real-time translation?).

  • As always, people will laugh at early adopters, only to realise how transformative these devices are when they’ll try them on themselves.

2) Voice interfaces will make a comeback and stick around this time.

• More people will realise that the the most natural way to interact with LLMs is via voice, not typing. Speaking to your phone, laptop or other hardware device, at home and in public, will become increasingly normalised.

• Apple will massively revamp Siri (maybe rebrand it). Airpods will evolve to being much more than wireless headphones. A lack of wearable camera in Apple’s arsenal of products may prove to be a disadvantage if Meta’s Smart Glasses, Humane Pin, etc prove that multimodal capabilities are especially valuable to end-users… which I reckon they will be.

3) The transcription of ‘everything’ will become the norm.

• People will begin to feel way more comfortable with the idea that what they say (at least during work meetings) will be fully transcribed. We’ll see less awkard bots lurking in Zoom/Teams calls. We’ll have to assume that people on the other side of the screen are recording our conversations locally on their machines.

• More tools will be built to enable people to effortlessly capture and query conversational data. Note taking / idea capture will evolve. Manually tagging content will increasingly become a thing of the past. The idea of having a 'second brain' will no longer be limited to those willing to spend significant time learning how to use tools like Obsidian, Logseq, etc.

4) The way ‘news’ gets uncovered, reported and consumed will continue to rapidly change.

• Trust in the MSM will continue to erode. Last year wasn’t great, this year will probably be worse.

• People will increasingly flock to X, TikTok, Reddit, closed messaging groups, etc to get their news.

• More individual “reporters” will grow channels with reach far greater than many major publishers. Some of these individuals will spread total garbage and make a killing in the process, particularly around the upcoming US elections and ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Others will help crack down real stories (think Bill Ackman vs Higher Ed).

• In the lead up to several of the major global elections (e.g. US, India, UK, etc) and ongoing conflicts around the world, investment into tools that counter misinformation and disinformation will surge. Tackling this will require tight public/private sector cooperation.

• Speaking of disinformation, we’ll see many more deepfakes in 2024 due to rapid advancements in image, video and audio generation models. Public figures will look to own / license their data.

• More major publishers will begin to realise the value of the proprietary data they sit on and more will follow the NYT. Generally speaking, we’ll see a lot more litigation around dataset use for model training.

• Most publishers will ramp up significantly on AI tooling to drive efficiency around reporting/editing, with an aim of fighting back at UGC, which has rapidly been eating their lunch.

• TikTok will face significant challenges in the West.

5) Apple will follow Google's Gemini Nano and launch their own powerful, on-device LLM, which will unlock a wave of new opportunities in mobile.

• Way, way more people will experience the magic of GenAI for the very first time (most of still only heard, not experienced it).

• Google Search will lose substantial market as a result.

• We’ll see a wave of new mobile apps launch with AI at the core. There will be lots happening in consumer.

6) Higher ed will continue to lose its stance as a relevant path for most.

• On the back of the Harvard, UPenn, MIT congressional hearing in 2023, we’ll see a bigger chunk of gifted students opt to avoid higher ed altogether and go straight into the workforce, start businesses, self-teach, etc. We’ll see (hopefully) more reputable employers opt to hire straight out of high school.

  • This mindset shift towards higher ed among young, talented individuals and their parents will present new opportunities for building new, innovative models that attract and nurture young talent (think forks of the Thiel Fellowship).

• More and more students in the long tail of academic capability will realise that 3-4 years in a classroom + a ton of debt makes little sense. Why go study something that will likely be irrelevant by the time semester 1 ends (maybe even by the time it begins)?

7) Directness, first principles thinking and intellectual discourse will once again be ‘in’.

• There will be a return to valuing no BS directness.

• New founders will opt to cement their cultures with this in mind.

8) We’ll collaborate with machines more than we collaborate with our human colleagues.

• We’ll see more and more ‘copilots’ for just about everything.

• Services firms (e.g. legal, accountancies, etc) will begin to increasingly rely on AI for their day-to-day. We’ll also see new, full-stack players enter the market with a goal of displacing them.

9) We’ll see more large companies cull entire departments due to AI. We’ll also see the first real signs of uptick in employee productivity.

• Customer service will likely be the first function AI drives real efficiency in. Reason being: the tech is basically there + the high, organic churn of CS agents means that human-to-machine transition from a people lens won’t be hard. Sales will likely follow.

• As more employers continue to invest in internal AI tools, expectations around output per employee will rise significantly. Management expectations will be far higher than what is actually possible in the short term.

10) In secret, more of us will befriend (dare I say fall in love) with AI companions.

• Girlfriends, boyfriends, friends… you name it. Think this is bad? Go share your thoughts with the quarter of adults around the world who feel lonely at this very moment.

11) We’ll see a new cohort of artificial-first celebrities emerge across most major social platforms.

• Some will strike massive brand deals.

12) We will see a continued societal pull towards wellbeing.

• More and more people will use LLMs to better understand their stats (e.g. wearable recordings, blood test results, etc) and inform decisions/actions.

• Digital addiction will continue to get worse. Products that help people detox will gain momentum (think Sol Reader).

13) As a continuation from the last few years, we’ll see more people parallelise work.

• Think fractional, side projects, selling stuff online, running paid communities etc. More companies will lean in to enable this trend.

• We’ll also see more people launch bootstrapped, profitable software companies targeting hyper niches in their spare time. AI will be a big unlock for this.

14) Image, video and audio generation models will continue to get a whole lot better.

• Expect to see way more products built on top of these.

• More creatives will look at AI as a massive threat, and in some cases rightfully so (illustrators?). Many will begin to accept times are changing and start to adopt AI for their own work. Improved creative capabilities and speed of iteration will be a positive surprise for most.

15) ‘Agents’ will increasingly pick up a lot of our grunt work.

• We’ll see a surge of new vertical-specific agent solutions come to market. We’ll also see a bunch of ‘build-your-own’ platforms and agent marketplaces launch.

• Speed will not be a focus. Accuracy/value will. The parallelisation of multiple tasks carried on by multiple agents will make us increasingly productive.

• Browsers will become agent-enabled.