Move over, metaverse. Step aside, self-driving cars. The hottest trend of 2023 wasn't some sci-fi gadget or pie-in-the-sky concept; it was the omnipresent, ever-evolving force of artificial intelligence. From Wall Street to your local bodega, AI wasn't just infiltrating our lives, it was remaking them in its own image.
If that sounds a touch self-aggrandizing, it’s because generative AI wrote even that opening paragraph. It isn’t wrong, though.
Large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard exploded in popularity this year, while Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)'s share price more than tripled as demand for its powerful AI chips skyrocketed.
Let’s take a look back at what some of the major players in AI accomplished this year and where they plan to go next in 2024.
OpenAI (and Microsoft)
ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and a year later the AI chatbot had nearly 100 million users every week, CEO Sam Altman said last month. Altman has a wild year, too, but we’ll get to him in a second.
Its journey to prominence got a jolt in January when Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) injected a cool $10 billion into the AI startup, 10x what it first invested in 2019.
ChatGPT became the fastest-growing app in history, with its most powerful version to date (GPT-4 Turbo) unveiled at a developer day event in November.
That’s when the wheels briefly came off the track for Altman. The CEO was shockingly ousted by three non-employee board members and a third co-founder, which led to co-founder and president Greg Brockman's resignation and employees threatening to leave the company en masse.
Microsoft quickly tapped Altman to lead an AI research team at the company, and OpenAI found a new CEO in Emmett Shear before reversing course and reinstating Altman with a restructured board of directors in place — all in the span of a few days.
In 2024, OpenAI will continue to develop the GPT Store, where it has said users will be able to sell their own custom GPT models built with OpenAI’s software. The company will also hopefully continue to update ChatGPT to have a later cutoff date than January 2022 for its training data.
ChatGPT’s main foil this year has been Bard, which Google rolled out in March and made available to the public in May.
In December, Google announced that Bard would now be powered by an AI model called Gemini, which the Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) company claimed can deliver more advanced reasoning and deeper understanding.
Gemini will ultimately be available in three sizes, Ultra, Pro and Nono, making it able to run on everything from small mobile devices to large data centers.
A version of Gemini Pro that can respond to text-based prompts in Bard is currently available, and in 2024, Google plans to launch Bard Advanced, which includes access to Gemini Ultra.
The most powerful Gemini iteration will offer “multimodal” reasoning capabilities, with the ability to understand and respond to text, images, audio, video and computer code — even if the company did fudge a demo video at its investor day.
Amazon
In April, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN, ETR:AMZ)'s Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its own generative AI service named Bedrock, which is designed to assist enterprise customers in incorporating AI into their businesses with its large language model Titan.
In September, the ecommerce titan invested $4 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic, which has developed its own AI chatbot called Claude 2.
Then came Amazon Q, an AI chat tool designed as a resource for businesses' employees to ask questions about their company.
Meta
The Metaverse has become something of a punchline for losing Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB) tens of billions since 2019, but these days the company is all-in on AI.
In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.”
That has taken a number of forms, from its Llama family of large language models to chatbots with the personalities of celebrities and generative AI-created reaction stickers.
There’s Meta AI, a recently launched conversational assistant for Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram that can deliver real-time information and generate photo-realistic images based on user-inputted prompts.
Nvidia (and other semiconductor companies)
It’s impossible to talk about large language models without discussing the powerful AI computer chips that power them.
Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is the undisputed leader in the AI chip sector (so much so the company got its own 2023 recap) with its market cap crossing the $1 trillion threshold in May.
Demand is at blisteringly high levels, which propelled Nvidia to beat Wall Street’s projected third-quarter revenue by an unheard of $2 billion.
In 2024, UBS analysts believe Nvidia's revenue could approach $100 billion, driven in part by its H200 graphics processing unit coming in the second quarter.
The H200 has 1.4x the memory bandwidth and 1.8x the memory capacity of the H100 chip, which OpenAI used to train GPT-4. It will be able to handle intensive AI model training due to its memory upgrades, which include being the first of its kind to use a faster memory spec known as HBM3e.
Competitors like Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ:AMD, ETR:AMD) are fighting to get in on the action. AMD recently launched its MI300X AI chip, which has been positioned as a potentially cheaper rival to Nvidia’s leading-edge microchips.
Then there’s ARM, a semiconductor technology firm that made waves in 2023 for designing the technology used by firms like Nvidia, Google, Meta and others to develop AI chips.
More than 7.1 billion Arm-based chips were shipped during the third quarter, the company said in November.
The SoftBank-backed company went public in September, and investors will watch its development closely in 2024.