The 4 biggest AI stories of 2024 and one key prediction for 2025

By any measure, 2024 was the best year ever for artificial intelligence – at least when it comes to commercializing the technology.

The enormous language model (LLM) boom sparked by the launch of ChatGPT in delayed 2022 shows no signs of slowing down, with numerous novel LLM models introduced not only by OpenAI and tech stalwarts like Microsoft, Meta and Google, but also dozens other startups and individual developers.

Reports of a slowdown in artificial intelligence research have proven to be, if not unfounded, certainly exaggerated for now.

Additionally, novel technologies have begun to emerge beyond the Transformer architecture that underlies most enormous LLMs, such as Liquid AI’s Liquid Foundation Models.

And finally, companies have begun to fully embrace an “agency” approach to AI – developing specific AI-powered bots, applications, and workflows that can work on specific problems independently or with less human involvement than the typical back-and-forth of LLM chatbots .

Getting this year’s news down to the top fourteen, much less the top ten or top four, was a vexing effort. But I went ahead and tried, even if I cheated a little, by combining several stories into larger themes. In my opinion, here’s what will have the biggest impact on moving out this year:

1. OpenAI has expanded far beyond ChatGPT

The company arguably most responsible for ushering in the gen AI era hasn’t lost a penny this year, despite intensifying competition from upstarts and legacy technologies, and even its own investor and partner Microsoft.

o3 model: It followed the example of the o1 model from September, announcing a hit at the end of the year more advanced model o3. While this solution won’t be available publicly or even to third parties until early 2025, it shows that OpenAI is not resting on its laurels.

ChatGPT Search: Initially introduced as a standalone, invitation-only product called SearchGPT and later collapsed into ChatGPT proper, this feature enables real-time searches of web information within ChatGPT and improved presentation of search results, increasing its usefulness for timely queries and head head to head with Google, Bing and newcomer Perplexity.

Canvas: Introduced in October, Canvas extends ChatGPT beyond a conversational interface to a workstation-like panel that can dynamically update content at the user’s request, such as editing a document or coding project. Of course, it was demanding not to see this as a reaction to, or at least comparable to, Anthropic’s Artifacts announced a few months earlier.

Sora: After almost a year of teasing us with its closely guarded video generator model, OpenAI finally brought Sora to the masses in early December, quickly generating a wide range of reactions as it sought to stand out in the extremely competitive AI video space with a unique and well-thought-out interface and storyboarding feature.

2. Open source AI has taken off

Lama 3 and 3.1: Meta introduced Llama 3 in April, setting a novel performance standard in open-source AI, and then quickly introduced Llama 3.1 in July with 405 billion parameters. Llama 3.1 releases were used to power Meta AI, the company’s assistant integrated with platforms such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook, with the goal of becoming the most widely used AI assistant.

Lama 3.3: Released in December 2024, Llama 3.3 delivers performance comparable to larger models, but at a fraction of the compute cost, making it more accessible to enterprise applications.

Meanwhile, Chinese models such as Alibaba’s Qwen-2.5 family and DeepSeek’s novel V2.5 and R1-Lite Preview models emerged seemingly out of nowhere to top some benchmark rankings, with Nvidia itself going above and beyond to provide graphics cards and architectures software to release its own open source, powerful Nemotron-70B model.

Nous Research, a diminutive San Francisco-based company that aims to offer more personalized and less restrictive AI models in an open-source format, also showed off some chilly novel ideas.

And let’s not forget the French company Mistral, which has quickly expanded its own offering of open-source and proprietary AI solutions.

3. Google’s Gemini series has become a sedate contender for the best available

Google introduced Gemini 2.0 Flash, a multimodal AI model that can analyze streaming video and can see and instruct what you’re doing on screen, and then introduced Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which competes with OpenAI’s o1 and o3 inference models.

4. Agentic AI has taken over the enterprise

Agentforce 2.0 by Salesforce: Salesforce a few days ago announced Agentforce 2.0, an advanced AI agent program that enhances inference, integration and customization capabilities across CRM and Sales offerings, as well as Slack, significantly improving enterprise productivity tools.

Joule SAP: SAP transformed the Joule chatbot into an open-source Enormous Language Model (LLM)-based AI agent, driving innovation and efficiency in enterprise environments.

Google Astra project: As part of its Gemini 2.0 initiative, Google launched Project Astra, an AI assistant designed to provide real-time contextual responses by leveraging Google’s suite of services to enhance user productivity and decision-making.

My huge prediction for 2025: AI-generated content will reign supreme

Building on these advances, 2025 will see the proliferation of AI-generated content across business and consumer domains, especially as everyone from OpenAI to Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and even Elon Musk’s xAI now have built-in AI image generators to their sacrifice.

This extension will streamline content creation, improve personalization, and augment efficiency across sectors.

Additionally, we anticipate initial large-scale deployments of Enormous Language Models (LLM) and AI-powered generative robotics in both commercial and consumer environments, which will revolutionize automation and human-robot interactions.

That’s all for the last #AIBeat newsletter for 2024. Thank you for reading, writing, subscribing, sharing, commenting and being here with us. I can’t wait to share more with you and hear more from you in 2025.

Merry Christmas and Novel Year from all of us at VentureBeat to you and your loved ones.