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Let us be thankful for the AI industry. Its leaders may be nudging humans closer to extinction, but this year, they provided us with a gloriously messy spectacle of progress. When I say year, I mean the long year that began late last November, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and, in doing so, launched generative AI into the cultural mainstream. In the months that followed, politicians, teachers, Hollywood screenwriters, and just about everyone else tried to understand what this means for their future. Cash fire-hosed into AI companies, and their executives, now glowed up into international celebrities, fell into Succession-style infighting. The year to come could be just as tumultuous, as the technology continues to evolve and its implications become clearer. Here are five of the most important questions about AI that might be answered in 2024.

Is the corporate drama over?

OpenAIs Greg Brockman is the president of the worlds most celebrated AI company and the golden-retriever boyfriend of tech executives. Since last month, when Sam Altman was fired from his position as CEO and then reinstated shortly thereafter, Brockman has appeared to play a dual rolepart cheerleader, part glue guyfor the company. As of this writing, he has posted no fewer than five group selfies from the OpenAI office to show how happy and nonmutinous the staffers are. (I leave to you to judge whether and to what degree these smiles are forced.) He described this years holiday party as the companys best ever. He keeps saying how focused, how energized, how united everyone is. Reading his posts is like going to dinner with a couple after an infidelity has been revealed: No, seriously, were closer than ever. Maybe its true. The rank and file at OpenAI are an ambitious and mission-oriented lot. They were almost unanimous in calling for Altmans return (although some have since reportedly said that they felt pressured to do so). And they may have trauma-bonded during the whole ordeal. But will it last? And what does all of this drama mean for the companys approach to safety in the year ahead?

An independent review of the circumstances of Altmans ouster is ongoing, and some relationships within the company are clearly strained. Brockman has posted a picture of himself with Ilya Sutskever, OpenAIs safety-obsessed chief scientist, adorned with a heart emoji, but Altmans feelings toward the latter have been harder to read. In his post-return statement, Altman noted that the company was discussing how Sutskever, who had played a central role in Altmans ouster, can continue his work at OpenAI. (The implication: Maybe he cant.) If Sutskever is forced out of the company or otherwise stripped of his authority, that may change how OpenAI weighs danger against speed of progress.

Is OpenAI sitting on another breakthrough?

During a panel discussion just days before Altman lost his job as CEO, he told a tantalizing story about the current state of the companys AI research. A couple of weeks earlier, he had been in the room when members of his technical staff had pushed the frontier of discovery forward, he said. Altman declined to offer more details, unless you count additional metaphors, but he did mention that only four times since the companys founding had he witnessed an advance of such magnitude.

During the feverish weekend of speculation that followed Altmans firing, it was natural to wonder whether this discovery had spooked OpenAIs safety-minded board members. We do know that in the weeks preceding Altmans firing, company researchers raised concerns about a new Q* algorithm. Had the AI spontaneously figured out quantum gravity? Not exactly. According to reports, it had only solved simple mathematical problems, but it may have accomplished this by reasoning from first principles. OpenAI hasnt yet released any official information about this discovery, if it is even right to think of it as a discovery. As you can imagine, I cant really talk about that, Altman told me recently when I asked him about Q*. Perhaps the company will have more to say, or show, in the new year.

Does Google have an ace in the hole?

When OpenAI released its large-language-model chatbot in November 2022, Google was caught flat-footed. The company had invented the transformer architecture that makes LLMs possible, but its engineers had clearly fallen behind. Bard, Googles answer to ChatGPT, was second-rate.

Many expected OpenAIs leapfrog to be temporary. Google has a war chest that is surpassed only by Apples and Microsofts, world-class computing infrastructure, and storehouses of potential training data. It also has DeepMind, a London-based AI lab that the company acquired in 2014. The lab developed the AIs that bested world champions at chess and Go and intuited protein-folding secrets that nature had previously concealed from scientists. Its researchers recently claimed that another AI they developed is suggesting novel solutions to long-standing problems of mathematical theory. Google had at first allowed DeepMind to operate relatively independently, but earlier this year, it merged the lab with Google Brain, its homegrown AI group. People expected big things.

Then months and months went by without Google so much as announcing a release date for its next-generation LLM, Gemini. The delays could be taken as a sign that the companys culture of innovation has stagnated. Or maybe Googles slowness is a sign of its ambition? The latter possibility seems less likely now that Gemini has finally been released and does not appear to be revolutionary. Barring a surprise breakthrough in 2024, doubts about the companyand the LLM paradigmwill continue.

Are large language models already topping out?

Some of the novelty has worn off LLM-powered software in the mold of ChatGPT. Thats partly because of our own psychology. We adapt quite quickly, OpenAIs Sutskever once told me. He asked me to think about how rapidly the field has changed. If you go back four or five or six years, the things we are doing right now are utterly unimaginable, he said. Maybe hes right. A decade ago, many of us dreaded our every interaction with Siri, with its halting, interruptive style. Now we have bots that converse fluidly about almost any subject, and we struggle to remain impressed.

AI researchers have told us that these tools will only get smarter; theyve evangelized about the raw power of scale. Theyve said that as we pump more data into LLMs, fresh wonders will emerge from them, unbidden. We were told to prepare to worship a new sand god, so named because its cognition would run on silicon, which is made of melted-down sand.

ChatGPT has certainly improved since it was first released. It can talk now, and analyze images. Its answers are sharper, and its user interface feels more organic. But its not improving at a rate that suggests that it will morph into a deity. Altman has said that OpenAI has begun developing its GPT-5 model. That may not come out in 2024, but if it does, we should have a better sense of how much more intelligent language models can become.

How will AI affect the 2024 election?

Our political culture hasnt yet fully sorted AI issues into neatly polarized categories. A majority of adults profess to worry about AIs impact on their daily life, but those worries arent coded red or blue. Thats not to say the generative-AI moment has been entirely innocent of American politics. Earlier this year, executives from companies that make chatbots and image generators testified before Congress and participated in tedious White House roundtables. Many AI products are also now subject to an expansive executive order.

But we havent had a big national election since these technologies went mainstream, much less one involving Donald Trump. Many blamed the spread of lies through social media for enabling Trumps victory in 2016, and for helping him gin up a conspiratorial insurrection following his 2020 defeat. But the tools of misinformation that were used in those elections were crude compared with those that will be available next year.

A shady campaign operative could, for instance, quickly and easily conjure a convincing picture of a rival candidate sharing a laugh with Jeffrey Epstein. If that doesnt do the trick, they could whip up images of poll workers stuffing ballot boxes on Election Night, perhaps from an angle that obscures their glitchy, six-fingered hands. There are reasons to believe that these technologies wont have a material effect on the election. Earlier this year, my colleague Charlie Warzel argued that people may be fooled by low-stakes AI imagesthe pope in a puffer coat, for examplebut they tend to be more skeptical of highly sensitive political images. Lets hope hes right.

Soundfakes, too, could be in the mix. A politicians voice can now be cloned by AI and used to generate offensive clips. President Joe Biden and former President Trump have been public figures for so longand voters perceptions of them are so fixedthat they may be resistant to such an attack. But a lesser-known candidate could be vulnerable to a fake audio recording. Imagine if during Barack Obamas first run for the presidency, cloned audio of him criticizing white people in colorful language had emerged just days before the vote. Until bad actors experiment with these image and audio generators in the heat of a hotly contested election, we wont know exactly how theyll be misused, and whether their misuses will be effective. A year from now, well have our answer.

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The Big Questions About AI in 2024 - The Atlantic

Here are some predictions that I doubt will happen in 2024 or the near future (and why I think so).Midjourney

2023 was the year of AI. Every month, weve seen new AI tools being launched, advancements in the field, upgrades, and more things that kept the field of AI moving.

Overhyped AI predictions werent missing in 2023 either. Throughout the year we heard things like AGI was (or will soon be) achieved or AI will take everyones job.

Heres why I think theyre overhyped and doubt theyll happen in the next years.

Almost every month theres a new ChatGPT killer at least thats what we see on the media. The latest ChatGPT killer (by consensus) was Gemini Ultra, a tool that beat GPT-4 in the benchmarks but isnt available yet to the public.

Even if Gemini Ultra is slightly superior to GPT-4, tech superiority doesnt always translate to market dominance and Google knows that (probably thats why they created too much hype with their demo).

I checked some articles and videos that claim Google will kill ChatGPT to find out how they came to such conclusions. Here are some of the arguments I found.

I don't think any of these arguments are enough to claim that Google will indeed kill ChatGPT.

Why? Well, #2 is not a good metric to say whether a product will kill its competitor. Recently, Google shares sank following reports that some of their AI Gemini Ultra demo was faked. This doesnt mean Gemini Ultra is a bad model or that it cant compete with GPT-4 but shows the consequences of Google overhyping its own product.

On the other hand, even if #1 is true, its not enough. Google might have the resources to create a tool to compete

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Google Will Kill ChatGPT and Other Overhyped AI Predictions We Heard In 2023 - Medium

In 1897, literary icon Mark Twain is said to have come across his own obituary in a New York newspaper. Asked for his response, tongue partly in cheek, Twain famously said the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.

The same sentiment might be said about the current and future state of American white collar work. An influx of headlines propose that millions of jobs are set to disappear within a decade or two. Depending on who you ask or which article you click on, you may well find your job on a list.

Theres no getting around the fact that jobs ten years from now will call on an entirely new set of skillsand maybe an entirely new set of workers. At least, if you ask Harvard Business School management professor and future of work expert Joseph Fullerwhether reports of the death of well-paid, long-standing jobs are in fact exaggerated.

The future of white collar work is going to be different, but jobs wont disappear en masse, Fuller, who co-leads Harvards Managing the Future of Work initiative, tells Fortune. Some skills will always be crucial, so its important to remain agile and continually look for ways of upskilling and not fearing the future.

This prospect isnt quite as daunting as it sounds. The shape of work has morphed and reoriented countless times in the past. On a macro level, consider the Industrial Revolution. For a flash in the pan, consider Y2K mania. But, even in moments of grave uncertainty, people tend to chug along. Humans have always adapted, refining their skills and retrofitting their careers to the current needs of the workforce. And despite a perennial fear of a technocratic future, robots havent nearly caught up to us yet.

The U.S., and indeed the industrialized world, is trending towards a future in which our jobs as they exist today will gradually become unrecognizable. Its the question of just how quickly and widely those changes will take hold thats spurred endless debate. In todays post-COVID landscape, the overarching fear of job disappearance stems from three discrete rising threats: remote work, Generative AI like ChatGPT, and skills-based hiring. But experts say none are quite as threatening as they seem.

Most everyone likes flexible work. But those who have been living it up in their remote-first or fully remote desk jobs since 2020 may be in for a rude awakening. If youve proven you can work from anywhere, your boss could also deduce that it can be done by someone else, somewhere else, for much cheaper. Some experts believe that could lead to a mass exodus of remote jobs in the U.S., potentially within a decade.

If people that code for Google and Facebook were able to live wherever in the U.S. they wanted and [work] for a year and a half without ever going to the office, it seems very, very likely that a lot of companies will be rethinking this longer-term and outsourcing those kinds of jobs that didnt used to be outsourced, Anna Stansbury, an assistant professor of work and organization studies at MIT Sloan School of Management who teaches a course on the future of work, told Fortune last year. Needless to say, the American workforce would seismically change if well-paid white collar jobs suddenly move overseas.

According to additional data from the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), more jobs than you might think are in fact highly offshorable. Bosses, paying big-city salaries to workers who long ago relocated to smaller, cheaper towns, are already asking themselves whether someone needs to be physically close to an office or their actual team. Within a few years, work that can be reasonably done remotely by people in such jobs will inevitably be done by telemigrants, NBER said.

But maybe not so fast. Social and cultural contexts across countries [make] it less likely that a public relations specialist or a sales engineer located in Hanoi is a perfect substitute for one located in Seattle, the researchers added.

And an analysis by The Washington Post finds little evidence that this will happen any time soon, at the very least. Even if it does, American white-collar workers are in the best possible position to survive the worst of it. As the Post puts it, theyre the most mobile and most marketable employees in the workforce.

Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of tony Ivy League graduates like the thought that networking connections and ritzy diplomas will soon hold little weight in hiring managers eyes. More and more executives have opened their arms to degreeless workers with demonstrable skillsor an appetite to learn those skills.. The craze has been dubbed skills-based hiring, or skills-first, if you ask former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, whos been championing the cause for a decade.

The percentage of IBM job listings requiring a four-year degree dropped from 95% in 2011 to under 50% in January 2021, to no discernible effect on productivity. Rometty later told Fortune CEO Alan Murray that hires without college degrees performed just as well as those with PhDs from leading universities.

The growing shift towards skills-based hiring will widen the talent pool, which in turn means bosses can hire someone with an untraditional or less credentialed background to do the same job for less. In simple terms, that may mean reliable entry-level jobs for college grads could disappear so to speak. Or that your job, regardless of level, will be given to a degreeless someone else. But what it really means is recruiting will become more democratizedan easy net positive for the entire workforce. And that you might need to sharpen your skills.

Fuller finds skills-based hiring very valuable. Drawing on his own research on the topic, he said when companies removed a college degree requirement from a job listing, they often then infused new language in the job description, asking for greater social skills, ability to manage, ability to reason, ability to deal with strangers, and executive functioning. (Commonly referred to as soft skills.)

Do I think white collar work will inevitably require a college degree? Absolutely not, he says. It will require certain types of technical or hard skills not necessarily indicated by college.

That may also be the case for AIwhich he deems the biggest threat of them all, although still overblown.

Its hard to ignore the impact of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, even in its nascent stage. This year alone, 4,000 tech industry jobs have been rendered unnecessary due to the manifold recent technological advancements, per a report from recruiting firm Challenger, Grey and Christmas.

We do believe AI will cause more job loss, though we are surprised how quickly the technology was cited as a reason, senior vice president Andy Challenger told Fortune. It is incredible the speed the technology is evolving and being adapted. Some CEOs have said AI is moving faster than real life, leaving scant hope for tech-averse workers to keep up.

Thats left millions of U.S. workers terrified that theyll lose their jobsnearly one-quarter of them worry that rapidly advancing technology will soon render them obsolete, per a recent Gallup survey. Another study conducted by The Harris Poll in partnership with Fortune found that 40% of workers familiar with ChatGPT worry it will replace them.

But those most at risk of getting displaced arent the tech workers Challengers research focused on; AI is creating new jobs for tech workers just as quickly as old jobs are going extinct. (That doesnt mean new AI coworkers wont lead to, if not an extinction, a pay cut.) The real at-risk workers are those in rote, repetitive jobs.

I wouldnt want to be someone who does the reading or summarization of business books to send out 20-page summaries, because AI is really good at summarization already, Fuller says. A significant chunk of what people do today will go away, he predicted, but nonetheless a material amount of work will remain.

That work will be a lot less dull, a lot less routine, and [have] a lot less filling out of expense resorts or quarterly forecast updates, he adds, reasoning that AI will subsume the tiresome duties, leaving humans with the more interesting tasks. While well still need basic AI know-how, a LinkedIn report finds that robots are less likely to snap up meaningful work and more likely to simply change workflows and outsource repetitive tasks, leaving us better at our jobs so we can focus on our soft skills. Work that relies on judgment, motivation, collaboration, and ideating is the fun part of work, Fuller says, with the added benefit of being much harder to automate.

As in the case with skills-based hiring, its less that AIs preponderance indicates that jobs are disappearing, and more that the needed skills are shifting. For most workers, the future will be less about evaporating job opportunities and more about a pressing need to upskill.

The throughline of each of these threats is that while they may purport to slash job openings, or merely make it easier for someone else to nab your dream job, what they actually do is redefine what a job entailsand who is capable of holding one. At the end of the day, employment is a human-to-human interaction, and these threats dont render soft skills or interpersonal bonds any less valuable.

You have to think about these trends through the lens of human experience and human desire and human biases, Fuller said. The best companies in the future will be using the individual as a unit of analysis. Not the job description, not the paygrade.

And were hardly in a catastrophe. Unemployment this year has held steady at record lows, indicating more jobs than seekers. The bottom line is that the labor market for white-collar jobs is incredibly dynamic, Juan Pablo Gonzalez, senior client partner and sector leader for professional services at Korn Ferry, told the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM) in June. Work is being reimagined, not eliminated. Its not that the jobs are going away; the jobs are changing.

Besides, Fuller says workers wont hang onto jobs that dont fulfill them because they think their options are limited. People will be picky where they can, he explains, and theyll keep looking for the jobs that dont dominate their lives.

The enduring grand technological innovations are those that eliminate grunt work, in turn creating a new class of jobsnot fewer human jobs altogether. These three much-discussed threats also provide a glimpse into a future that will involve upskilling. If a typical job description ten or twenty years from now looks drastically differentas it is wont to do in our age of rapid advancementat least well have a sense of why.

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Remote work, AI, and skills-based hiring threaten to put our jobs on the chopping blockbut experts say those fears are overblown - Fortune

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says artificial intelligence (AI) is the most revolutionary technology he has seen in decades. He formed that opinion after watching ChatGPT ace a college-level biology exam that included open-ended essay questions. Gates shared his thoughts in a recent blog post:

The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get healthcare, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.

Take a moment to consider how profoundly those technologies changed the world, as well as the wealth they created in the process. Such inflection points come along rarely, and many experts (including Gates) believe AI is the next one. The best way for investors to capitalize on that once-in-a-generation opportunity is to build a basket of AI stocks.

Here's why Cloudflare (NET -0.62%) belongs in that basket.

To understand why Cloudflare should benefit from the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, investors must first know what the company does and how it compares to peers. The short answer is that Cloudflare makes the internet faster and safer. The longer answer is that it provides a broad range of application, network, security, and developer services that accelerate and protect corporate software and infrastructure.

Cloudflare has differentiated itself through performance and scale. It operates the fastest cloud network and developer platform on the market, and it handles about 20% of internet traffic. Its platform is also cloud neutral, meaning it improves performance and security across public clouds and private data centers. That makes Cloudflare a useful partner even for businesses that rely on other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

The upshot of its unmatched performance is that Cloudflare has established a strong presence in several cloud computing verticals, including developer services. Forrester Research recently recognized Cloudflare as the leader in edge development platforms, citing a superior product (i.e., Cloudflare Workers) and a stronger growth strategy compared to other vendors.

Management believes that its value proposition for developers -- unmatched speed and cloud-neutral technology -- will make Cloudflare a key part of the AI value chain. The company is leaning into that opportunity. It recently announced Workers AI, a service that allows businesses to build AI applications and run machine learning models on its network. Workers AI is accelerated by Nvidia GPUsand supported by other Cloudflare products like R2 (object storage) and Vectorize (vector database).

It may be a few years before those innovations become meaningful revenue streams, but the company is very optimistic. CEO Matthew Prince says that "Cloudflare is the most common cloud provider used by the leading AI companies." He also believes Cloudflare is "uniquely positioned to become a leader in AI inferencing," a market that represents the biggest opportunity in AI.

Beyond developer services, Cloudflare also has a strong presence in several cybersecurity markets. Forrester Research recently named the company a leader in email security, and the International Data Corp. recognized its leadership in zero trust network access.

One reason for that success is the data advantage created by its immense scale. As previously mentioned, about 20% of internet traffic flows across the Cloudflare network. That gives the company deep insight into performance issues and security threats across the web, and it uses that information to continuously route traffic more efficiently and counter threats more effectively.

Cloudflare brings together network and security services with Cloudflare One, a secure access service edge (SASE) platform that protects and connects users to private applications, public cloud services, and the open internet. Cloudflare One addresses the widespread push to modernize network security. Consultancy Gartner believes 80% of enterprises will adopt SASE architecture by 2025, up from 20% in 2021.

Cloudflare values its addressable market at $164 billion in 2024, but sees that figure surpassing $200 billion by 2026. Developer services and network security services account for most of that total. Cloudflare already has a strong presence in both markets, meaning the company is well positioned for future growth.

Indeed, Cloudflare ranked No. 6 on the Fortune Future 50 List for 2023, an annual assessment of the world's largest companies based on long-term growth prospects. Making the list at all is an achievement, but taking sixth place is a testament to the company's tremendous potential. The authors attributed Cloudflare's high placement to opportunities in AI inferencing and cybersecurity.

With that in mind, analysts at Morningstar expect the company to grow revenue by 34% annually over the next five years, a reasonable estimate given that revenue increased by 46% annually during the past three years. In that context, the stock's current valuation of 23.5 times sales looks reasonable, and it's certainly a discount to the three-year average of 38.7 times sales.

That said, Cloudflare is not cheap and its share price will likely be volatile. But patient investors comfortable with price swings should feel confident in buying a small position in this growth stock today, especially as part of a broader basket of AI stocks.

John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Trevor Jennewine has positions in Amazon and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Gartner. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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A Once-in-a-Generation Investment Opportunity: 1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Growth Stock to Buy Now and Hold Forever - The Motley Fool