The past year has been crazy in the tech world, bringing us TikTok bans, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and a never-ending cycle of drama at OpenAI. Will things slow down in 2024, or will they continue at the same dizzying pace?
THE AI WORLD WILL COME FOR MORE CHAOS
Margaret Mitchell of AI company Hugging Face believes that by 2024 “at least one effective [AI] model” will become obsolete by impacting on relevant data. Mitchell also thinks that the AI excitement that carried us into 2023 will fade somewhat as people begin to realize that technology does not always offer a solution to our problems. “I guess it’s a backlash against the advertising of generative AI [for use] in fact-based applications like medicine and law,” she says.
At the same time, Mitchell believes that 2024 will witness the rise of task-specific models rather than generalizable models and increased competition in the graphics processing unit sector to meet the demand of artificial intelligence.
Worryingly, he says we need to be alert to the risks of AI defrauding us all through voice, language and images, especially older people whose maxim “Seeing is believing” still applies.
IT WILL BE MIXED IN THE ELECTIONS
It’s important we all keep our eyes open for the risks of technology-based manipulation in 2024, says Chris Hankin, professor at the Institute of Security Science and Technology at Imperial College London, UK. “2024 will be an important year for ‘democracy’ in both Europe and the US, with voters in 27 European Union countries voting in the European Parliament elections in June, the US Presidential elections in November and the parliamentary elections in November. England.”
Controlling bad behavior is likely to become a major headache. “Ahead of all these elections, detecting and preventing misinformation and disinformation, as well as cybersecurity of the voting process, are likely to pose major technological challenges in 2024,” he says.
CREATOR-LEADED BRANDS WILL CONTINUE FAST
From Kim Kardashian’s Skims shapewear to Logan Paul’s Prime drinks, creators have demonstrated their influence in the commercial world in recent years. Social media expert Matt Navarra also believes this will continue in 2024. “This will be led by big-name TikTok and YouTube stars,” he says. “We will see brands trying to collaborate with them and almost taking a backseat to the creator in developing these products and services.”
COMPANIES WILL CONTINUE TO PULL ADVERTISING FROM X
Navarra suggests that the decline of X (formerly Twitter) is the story of 2023 and that things will get worse in 2024. Many big brands have withdrawn their advertising dollars from X, but those that remain will be withdrawn over the next 12 months. “We’ll probably see another year of the same thing: more controversial tweets, more brands pulling back from using or advertising on the platform,” Navarra says.
Navarra also believes regulators will continue to crack down on Musk’s unrepentant disregard for certain moderation measures. (Of course, this month the EU launched its own threat of action against “I suspect we may see them as the first target for the implementation of some of these new regulatory powers.”
TOPICS WILL BE MADE TO INSTAGRAM
This bold prediction comes from creative economy entrepreneur Brendan Gahan. It may sound surprising, but he says it will be in keeping with the past. “Meta’s use of Threads is decreasing. This is despite new features being launched and made available on the web. “They will need to integrate it into Instagram to save it,” he explains.
Just look at Meta’s past playbook for this. “There hasn’t been a single standalone app that Meta has released that has survived,” he says. “They tried many times. They launched standalone TikTok, Snap and YouTube competitors. None of them stuck, but those features were integrated into Instagram.” He believes the same will be true here.
CYBER CRIME WILL BE MORE CARTELLED
“Cybersecurity will remain the biggest risk to organizations in 2024,” warns Jody Westby, CEO of Global Cyber Risk. “The use of productive AI and deepfakes in spear phishing attacks, AI-generated malware, and automated attacks will present significant challenges to organizations.”
THE METAVERSE WILL WORK—BUT IT WON’T FOLLOW MARK ZUCKERBERG’S VISION
The success of the metaverse was so obvious to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that he renamed his entire company to reflect its importance back in 2021. Yet in 2022 and 2023, the metaverse did n’t end up revolutionizing our lives. Things could change in 2024, says Irena Cronin, CEO of tech consultancy Infinite Retina.
“A metaverse 2.0 will be in full swing,” she says. “And it’ll have nothing to do with the Zuckerberg idea of the metaverse.” Zuckerberg’s idea was that we’d be constantly plugged into a Meta-built headset, gaming within a world that his company built, he says. Apple’s Vision Pro, the $3,500 headset first announced back in July 2023, could “potentially be bigger than the iPhone because it replaces the way we know computing,” she says.