We are in a new era of consuming information and producing information, thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence that occurred in the last year, wrote John Werner, MIT Senior Fellow and AI venture capitalist in artificial intelligence, in a Forbes column. Here are his selections for the top five major steps forward.
- Late in 2024, Google introduced Audio Overview, a text-to-podcast function of its NotebookLM where “non-human people gab about your chosen topic, sounding exactly like a couple of traditional disc jockeys.” The feature summarizes material that the user has uploaded (PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, Google docs).
- In December, OpenAI officially introduced Sora, which can create realistic videos from text. Users can now generate videos up to 1080p resolution, up to 20 seconds long.
- Liquid neural network technology, which allows AI to function with fewer resources, allowed Google to roll out its Gemini AI product on edge devices in February. Thus, vastly increasing users’ interaction with AI.
- During the year, the industry came closer to realizing artificial general intelligence, which can understand, learn and apply knowledge across a broad range of tasks. In particular, real-time translation can be integrated into our consumer products, instantly allowing the understanding of someone speaking a different language.
- The possibility of using quantum computing was introduced into AI, which will provide powerful processing of information.
“Throughout the year, obscure product demos became household names, people started to really zero in on using non-human sentient agents for problems like climate change and we also saw radical changes in the infrastructure behind these models,” Werner wrote. “There will never be another year like 2024 again for artificial intelligence.”
