3 Interesting Trends In AI For December 2024

One of the things that has stuck out to me over the last two years of market consolidation around AI is that a few companies have become household names in a really profound sense.

In a way, that’s not unusual for markets like this. We’ve been familiar with brands like Ford and Chevrolet for most of the years that automobiles have been on the road. Coke and Pepsi have slugged it out in the cola wars, with RC as a distant third.

It’s a little different with tech, though, in a number of ways, and one of those is related to the versatility of modern companies. This isn’t just entrepreneurial whim – it’s something that needs to happen. The landscape is changing so quickly that any company that can’t pivot will be left behind in the blink of an eye.

In fact, you could make the argument that even the biggest names are struggling to catch up with each other. Let’s look at three pieces of AI news that illustrate this mad scramble for tech dominance.

Integrating AI in Search

As new and more powerful models like ChatGPT o1 come out,we’re seeing that one of the fundamental use cases is replacing old keyword-based search.

To put another way, why on earth would you go to a browser bar and type in keywords to look for results, if you could just ask an LLM to bring you those results instead?

There’s a major format change, and also a change in the philosophy of search, if you will – we are doing less of the active searching, and the process is much more automated.

Also, instead of combing through hyperlinks for hours, you get detailed results that are targeted, in just seconds … or even parts of seconds!

So when I saw that Google is integrating an AI search function powered by Gemini into its long-dominant search engine, that was no surprise. To be fair, The Verge had been breakingheadlines related to this as early as this May. Now, Amir Efrati at The Information notes that Google is trying to recover some of that market and attention from OpenAI, which has been dominant in-AI powered search since its inception. If you don’t believe me, just go on the street and ask people: ‘what is ChatGPT?’ Even those with almost no connection to the industry or the market will know what you mean, and that’s not really the case with Gemini, or Perplexity, or any of those other tools.

Nvidia’s Big Web Services Business Idea

This one, for right now, has to fall in the realm of rumor – some are suggesting that Nvidia is about to make its play in B2B cloud and software services.

For over a decade, Amazon Web Services (or ‘AWS’ to its friends) has been the breakout provider of these vendor services to enterprise. You could argue that Microsoft is giving them a run for their money, but AWS is unmistakably the household name for things like object storage and serverless computing, or some kinds of virtualization instances.

However, Nvidia is now the biggest American technology company by market cap, and able to do quite a lot of what it puts its mind to.

So if, as articles like this one suggest, Nvidia wants to start selling web services and software subscriptions to businesses,leaders are estimating that the company can make $150 billion a year!

But it wouldn’t just be the money, either – that AWS branding would be challenged in executive rooms all over the world.

Open AI’s Publisher initiative

Here, the tech companies are actually trying to turn straw into gold with media partnerships to address that burning question of who profits from journalists’ work…

You can take a look at headlines like these on lawsuits by independent publishers like Raw Story to see what kinds of challenges OpenAI and others are dealing with. Essentially, if AI is using copyrighted journalism content for training, that could be running afoul of IP laws. Companies have been doing this for years – prior to the AI revolution, scurrilous firms were taking web-published journalism and reconstituting it under different format and branding, in ways that seemed abundantly illegal.

Now, though, OpenAI is able to, again, pivot, and change its business model in positive ways. Take a look at this news on OpenAI‘s agreement with the Associated Press where the AP suggests it will be able to find that balance, where journalism content will be protected, but OpenAI can use aspects of the company’s data for training.

If these partnerships are successful, they’ll probably represent the new model for news content moving forward. And we do need a new model, as newsrooms around the country continue to struggle.

Those are three of the things that are happening right now that are likely to have a major impact on what we see coming out of the enterprise world as we move into 2025.