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Just about a year ago, I wrote about 2023 being the year of LLMs. Models like Llama 2, Claude, and Cohere emerged as substantial challengers to OpenAI, fueling innovation across the board — but not for lack of speed bumps along the way. After such an explosive 2023, what lies ahead for AI in 2024?
The new year will be one where we see incredibly advanced AI applied in a number of new creative ways, and will undoubtedly lead to tremendous progress across industries writ large.
But there are also clear warning signs that AI will be used by bad actors. So, while the exact future remains unclear, one thing is certain: The advances made in AI in 2024 will have major implications for how we do work — and more importantly, how we live our lives.
We’ve seen this coming for some time, but as I wrote after the recent OpenAI DevDay event, AI development has increasingly been focused on AI agents. These smart, highly adapted tools are already beginning to make an impact in industry after industry, but what we have seen to date is nothing compared to what’s to come.
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The ReAct paper published earlier this year showed how LLMs could effectively learn how to use tools and spurred a lot of research in this direction. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have spent the year tuning their models to work better with this technique (OpenAI’s Function Calling, Anthropic’s Claude XML support, for example), and other institutions have trained specialized LLMs for this purpose (Berkeley’s Gorilla LLM). And developments in open-source libraries, like Langchain and Rivet, have made it much easier to apply these techniques.
Now easier and more affordable to develop than ever, AI agents will become ubiquitous. They act as force multipliers on human ingenuity and resourcefulness while connecting deeply into the data that matters most to the user and company. I believe we will look back at 2024 as the dawn of the “age of agents,” the beginning of a fundamentally new direction in how we address needs through software and interact with technology.
Smart, interactive collaboration will no longer be a ‘nice to have’
The other side of the shift into intelligent agents will be a massive change in user and customer expectations. Simply put, customers will begin demanding a new level of responsiveness and interaction from their technology. Users will stop thinking of it as “something we use” and start thinking of it as “something we collaborate with.”
User expectations change any time there is a major shift in technology and user interface (UI).
