I don’t think I’ve ever seen, in all my decades covering technology, a year as tumultuous as 2024 in terms of tech progress. Is it really just two years since the ChatGPT era exploded onto the world stage?
We’re now almost numb to the launch of new models and new apps happening almost every other day. AI is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
Which makes it almost impossible to pick a best-of-the-year product. How to choose between the massive popularity of the OpenAI GPT products, Meta‘s outstanding LLama3 models, or the video magnificence that is KlingAI?
That last product is a telling one because it shows that this year has not only featured American tech giants. This was a year when the Chinese also started to flex their AI muscles — with Qwen and other models — to compete on an even playing field with the best of the rest.
Despite the growing competition, and a poor early start, for me the true product of the year is one that only came out in December — Google Gemini 2.
A lot of competition in 2024
This year has seen so many unexpected heroes. Claude Sonnet 3.5 from Anthropic was one of the biggest surprises, coming from nowhere to dominate the no-code AI app generation sector completely. Despite constant benchmark challenges from new models, coders across the world remain unanimous in their praise, keeping the Anthropic product at the top of the tree.
There have been so many products in such a short space of time that the brain whirls as the names speed past in the headlines. But one name has been suspiciously absent over most of the early part of the year — Google
Godfather of the transformer technology that revolutionized AI, Google largely lurked in the background until later in the year. But like a favorite racehorse, which falters at the first hurdle, we’ve seen signs it is about to flex its pedigree.
The first indication was the super low-key launch of a small skunkworks project called NotebookLM back in December of last year. It may have started small, but people soon realized what a powerful tool it could be for data research and understanding — especially once podcasting was added in September.
The rise and rise of Google in AI
It’s only in the past two months that we’ve been given a glimpse into the astonishing reality of what a Google AI-powered world could look like.
The flurry of Google product launches this December, based around the new Gemini 2.0 model are truly mind-blowing. New initiatives like Project Mariner and Project Astra show us for the first time what it looks like to have an AI embedded into our lives in all its forms.
Not just a chatbot here and there, but integrated vision, sound, computer manipulation and everything that’s been the promise of full AI since the consumer launch of the technology.
For this reason, I’m going to give my product of the year to the new Google Gemini 2.0 model in all its derivations. Not just for what it represents now, but for the promise it offers for the future of consumer AI.
However this new paradigm mustn’t be dominated by a single company or even two, but instead, a wide range of players balance out the risks and rewards that AI offers for the future of humanity.