How artificial intelligence impacted our lives in 2024 and what's next

Transcript

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Nick Schifrin: 2024 will be known as the year that artificial intelligence redefined the technology landscape. 2025 may be known as the year that the United States and tech leader allies of president-elect Trump try to win an A.I. race with China.

Jeffrey Brown takes a look at the ups and downs of A.I. advancement.

Jeffrey Brown: A.I. has quickly become part of everyday life, with A.I.-powered features integrated into everything, from search engines and cell phones to hospital equipment and politics.

But how fast, with what impact, and what are the limits on further growth?

For some end-of-the-year-thoughts, I’m joined by Reed Albergotti, technology editor of Semafor.

So, thanks so much for joining us.

And knowing that this is a fast-moving field, give us two or three of the big developments of the last year and why they stood out for you.

Reed Albergotti, Semafor: Yes, one, I think, is self-driving cars.

After stalling really with its progress over the last couple of years, we saw big leaps this year. And Waymo, which is Google’s autonomous driving robo-taxi that’s available in San Francisco and Arizona, is now going to expand to 10 cities in the upcoming year.

We also saw Tesla’s full self-driving make big strides. So that’s really interesting. I think another one with A.I. models were these text-to-video models, which were sort of teased by OpenAI’s Sora earlier this year. That’s now available to the public. And these allow you to prompt a model with text. And it comes up with this video that’s really almost indistinguishable from reality.

Google released its similar model, competing model, later this year. And I think the really big one that I think not enough people are paying attention to is the reasoning models. Late this year, we saw massive increases in capability due to this new technique, where, instead of just prompting an A.I. model and getting an answer back, the model will actually go back and find many different possibilities for an answer and do what’s called chain of thought reasoning, where it breaks down prompts into multiple steps.

And we’re — it’s very expensive right now to do this technique. But I think the costs are coming down. We will see massive improvements.

Jeffrey Brown: You mentioned the expense.

I mean, it’s not hard to find articles questioning the limits, the kind of roadblocks. What’s something that you thought might have happened that hasn’t happened so far? And what kind of limits are cropping up?

Reed Albergotti: Yes, I mean, this year — I really predicted that this year we would see a big change in how we use computers due to A.I.

So, instead of clicking and typing to do a given task on a computer, you will just ask that computer, I want to do this and it will do it for you. And that really hasn’t happened. And part of that is expense. Part of it is technological capability. And I think these reasoning models will help because they will allow us to sort of trust models more to actually carry out the tasks that we ask them to do and not sort of go off the rails.

So that may happen this year or next year. I think it will eventually. But at infrastructure costs, those are some of the big barriers, I think, to that sort of technology.

Jeffrey Brown: What about the government’s continuing or growing role, both first in regulations, in other ways in promoting A.I., and then, of course, its new connection to our politics?

Reed Albergotti: Yes, I think that the conversation around A.I. will completely change. I think we will talk less about reining the technology in.

And because of the big influence from people like Elon Musk on the incoming administration, I think we will see more talk about how we can get the U.S. to win the A.I. race with China. I think that’s going to be a big topic. And I think the way government will be able to help is by help building infrastructure and sort of clearing the red tape that prevents some of the development of new nuclear power plants or other forms of energy to power these huge data centers that are required to make these A.I. models work.

Jeffrey Brown: What about a couple of other developments that you’re looking forward to in the next year? I don’t know how good a predictor you have — you felt you have been in the past, but I’m going to make you come up with a couple for this year that might impact all of us in our daily lives.

Reed Albergotti: Yes, it’s always a fool’s errand to do this, but I will do it anyway.

I think, next year, we will see some big advancements in robotics. Right now, the way robotics works is, you program it for a very narrow and specific task. And I think we will see, maybe not in consumer products, but in sort of labs and maybe big tech companies showing off some of these experiments. We will see robots that are able to do tasks that they were not ever trained to do.

And that’s what people in the A.I. world call generalization or general intelligence. I think that we will see also another one that I think will get less attention, but it will be there, is new scientific research.

I think we will see papers come out in fields like physics and biology and material science where A.I. was — played a big part in making that — those discoveries. And that’s just because these models can read millions of pages of research in a few minutes that would take humans more than a lifetime to read.

Jeffrey Brown: So much is happening and so many of us still don’t get it or don’t understand the technology or its impact on us. What’s your advice to those of us in that situation?

Reed Albergotti: Well, first of all, you shouldn’t feel bad, because I think even people who are the top A.I. researchers in the world, they don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with this technology.

So pay attention to the technology, play around with it, be curious about it, because it eventually will make a massive difference in all of our lives.

Jeffrey Brown: All right, Reed Albergotti of Semafor, thank you very much and happy new year.

Reed Albergotti: Thanks. You too.