Where Artificial Intelligence Is Headed

here are five megatrends that I’m tracking

a new year, another set of trends. here are five i’m tracking to stay a step ahead of it.

1. thermodynamic computing

this is an exciting area of research, and it’s unclear whether it will gain traction in the new year. however, if researchers can successfully develop practical thermodynamic computing systems, it could open up new areas of ai with new efficient algorithms and energy savings. it’s worth keeping an eye on.

the company that i am most interested in following in this domain is extropic ai, led by guillaume verdon, aka beff jezos. i am also tracking carboculture, and i am on the lookout for more startups in this domain. follow the physicists.

2. edge-based ai

this is the implementation of ai at the edges, rather than centralized cloud computing facilities or data centers. deployed on devices such as sensors, edge-based ai has the potential to unlock new paradigms of intelligence.

there are too many startups in this domain to list here. i’m particularly interested in databricks, latent ai, and axelera ai.

3. text-to-video

i’ve loved experimenting with pika, and while 2023 was the year of generative images, i believe 2024 will be the year of generative video. runwayml is another company to follow here.

4. generative drug discoveries

watch this video from nvidia and genentech and tell me you’re not excited. the “lab in the loop” concept will bring drug discovery to the real world through ai, taking data to train algorithms, to generate new drugs that will become new medicines for patients.

5. agentic ai

unlike reactive bots and ai agents, agentic ai will be proactive in the sense that it will understand its environment, set goals, and act to achieve those objectives with limited direct supervision. openai recently wrote a whitepaper on agentic ai systems that is worth reading.

---

this list is by no means exhaustive. ai is now “eating intelligence” and it is impossible to track all developments at once.