Real AI trend or hype? That is the question. If you look at all of the AI news people, their content is always like the biggest news ever, a massive week for AI, and the most important news of this year. Sure, it is big news, but is it actually something that’s worth the time and the energy to dive deep into and keep up with?
Don’t get me wrong, you may genuinely love keeping up with the coolest new things, which by all means, keep doing that. But for a lot of people like myself, it’s kind of stressful trying to keep up with everything. So in this article, we’re going to figure out what the trends are that areare that are most worth keeping up with and identify the top job or business opportunities within these trends.Good morning. Your plans for today are to check in on the ads you’re running for your t-shirt business, track orders, address questions, then make new designs and post them on your store. But I’ve gone ahead and actually done all of these for you, so you’re all good for the What would you like for breakfast tea? Earl Grey hot and a banana sounds good. Here you go. Your friend Sally left you a video message telling you she wants to get a divorce. Use my avatar clone to video message her back, expressing my condolences. I’m so sorry to hear that, Sally. What are you thinking of doing next? Did you think of getting a divorce lawyer yet? Would you like to watch a movie now? Sure, I would like to watch a documentary on wooly mammoths one moment.
Okay, I generated an 80-minute documentary about wooly mammoths. Enjoy! Yeah, no, at least not yet. This is the hype cycle of emerging technologies. And this is where generative AI fits in, at a peak of inflated expectations, right about to slip into the trough of disillusionment. Maybe one day we’ll get to live in a world like those sci-fi movies, although hopefully not the dystopian ones. We’ll come back to this graph later, but for now, what we’ll be looking forward to for the next couple of years is more in line with a sentence from a recent blog article from IBM. Generative AI offers unique opportunities and solutions, but it will not be for everything or everyone. It’s cool, but not too cool. Microsoft Copilot for individuals came out in February 2024. Prior to Copilot, I asked if I needed to do a report advising a startup about whether they should go with opportunity A or opportunity B. Normally, I would have to open up Excel and spend at least a couple hours cleaning things up, fiddling around with it, and making some graphs. Then I have to put everything into a PowerPoint, which unfortunately for me takes me like five hours to do because I suck at making PowerPoints. Now these days, though, with Copilot, I can open up Excel and do some simple analyses just by prompting Excel what I want. It’s definitely not perfect, but I can do simple things like join tables together, remove empty rows, get some summary statistics, and generate some simple graphs. It definitely saves me at least an hour or so, because despite having a computer science degree and being a data scientist for two years at Meta, the embarrassing truth is I’m still not very good at using Excel because I usually just default to using Python or SQL.
But you know, business people like their spreadsheets. So anyway, now I need to transfer everything into PowerPoint, and it saves me at least two to three hours. You can use Microsoft Copilot and prompt PowerPoint to come up with the entire slide deck done in a beautiful fashion and with pictures. Yeah, you gotta tweak it a little bit and add certain things, change the graphs, and things like that, but genuinely, it saves me so much time, and people are like, Wow, your PowerPoint slides are so beautiful. For me, it’s honestly so worth it for the $20 a month that I pay. And I know it’s just going to get better and better over time. I know some people are going to say in the comments right now, Tina, that I don’t think it’s worth it. I think it’s overhyped. I get it, but for me, it is worth it. I got my music controls. If I go to the left, I can go back. Startups that are creating things like the Humane Pin and the Rabbit R1 are the ones aiming for that cool futuristic world. A world in which the founder of the R1 describes it as no longer needing your phone, no longer needing apps. You can simply use your voice to directly interact with the device, to request an Uber or their takeout, to translate conversations in real time, and the humane pin even has this cool holographic way for you to interact and type things. It totally makes sense how the Rabbit R1 sold out within minutes of its launch, but tools like Microsoft Copilot are the ones that you’d be realistically seeing gaining widespread adoption. Moving forward into 2024, you’ll see more products like Copilot, AI being integrated into already existing products, and more very specific niche use cases, which you may not even notice unless you’re actively looking for them, but they will be useful for most people by increasing their productivity, enabling people to do things like draw even though they’re not very good at drawing, and making things a lot cheaper so more people have access to them. This is called vertical AI integration. I’ll go into more detail about this later in the video, but for now, I just want to emphasize that even though vertical AI integration doesn’t sound good, it’s actually really remarkable. Even more remarkable than those cool AI gadgets and flashy software. In particular, there are three industries that experts say will have a lot of development because of AI. The first one is in healthcare. There are already new medicines and drugs that have been developed with the help of AI, molecules that we would never have thought of ourselves.
With AI, a lot of data that’s being stored in a variety of different places, new methods for personalized healthcare, and insights into diseases that we’ve been trying to solve for a long, long time. The second industry is sustainability. Experts predict that we’ll be able to see new AI-aided ways to come up with better solutions for this problem we’ve been solving for decades. Climate change and sustainability. They’ll be both in terms of developing technology and in policymaking and global politics. The third is the domain of education. Imagine a world where everybody has their own personalized tutor. Actually, Khan Academy has already built one. This will democratize education so that people who would never have gotten the chance to receive a good education can now do so at a very low cost. It would also allow teachers to cater more to different people’s learning styles. For example, some people learn better through text, some people learn better through audio, and some people learn better through videos. This will also be a huge game-changer for people who struggle with disabilities and learning problems. From a teacher’s perspective, this will also streamline so many of the things like grading and things like that in order to spend more of that time interacting with their students. It also allows teachers to share knowledge with each other and collectively come up with better curriculums and teaching methods. These are just some examples, and there are many other industries that will greatly benefit from the developments of AI. Let me know in the comments what industry you’re in and how you see AI transforming something or solving a problem within your industry. One example of vertical AI integration that massively boosts productivity is creating websites. I’ll show you how to do it in literally one minute using 10Web, which is the sponsor of today’s video. All right, we’ll start with generating your website; no credit card is required. We can create a new website using AI. And by the way, 10Web creates a fully functional WordPress website. Okay, so I want to create an informational website. The website I want to create today is a blog, and I’m actually going to make our first blog post based on this video of AI trends. So under business type, I’m going to find education, so education blog. Next English blog name: let’s call it How to AI. Describe your blog as a blog that talks about how to use AI, AI trends, the latest AI products, and AI news. Next, as the title of the blog, let’s call it AI Trends in 2024.
For the blog post description, I wrote down the trends that are covered in this video. So we have trend one, which is the integration of AI and everyday products to increase productivity, such as Microsoft Copilot. I’m not going to go into detail about the other trends yet, so keep watching the video, but this is the kind of description that I’m using. And under categories, we can write about AI trends. So finally, your website is waiting for you. So we will sign up with Google, and it will generate my personalized AI website. And we have our website, and by the way, Tenweb is a company that literally got sponsored by Andrew Ning, who is the creator of Coursera and just kind of like the world leader in AI. Anyway, let’s go look at our website. All right. How to use AI. AI and education, AI trends, website builders, AI history, and AI for small businesses. So we have AI trends in 2024, and then it features these different blog posts that we have. So it autofilled some of these and editors picks as well. You can subscribe to a newsletter about AI for small businesses. This is crazy, isn’t it? That’s it. That’s literally it. That’s all I put in. When you click into a tab like AI trends, for example, you can look at AI trends in 2024. And it describes all the AI trends that I talked about. Since this website is a fully functional WordPress website, you have access to all of the things that you have on WordPress. You can also edit the website really easily; no coding is required at all. You can try Tenweb Pro for 7 days for free. And in terms of pricing, we have the AI Starter, AI Premium, and AI Ultimate. The AI Starter is fine for simple websites, but I would recommend AI Premium so that you can have a more professional website. You don’t need to pay anything right now and will only be charged 7 days later. You don’t need to worry about things like hosting, backup, security, scalability, and domain integration. While I was processing, I wanted to say that something really cool about 10Web is that it’s actually completely open source as well. So you can also customize and build on top of it if you want to. And yeah, you can edit things around and tweak them completely by just dragging and dropping. After you’re happy with it, you can save and publish. And there you go. Your website is published. You can get started using 10Web using this link over here, also linked in the description. If you go through my link, you will also get a discount. All right, thank you, TenWeb, for sponsoring this portion of the video. Back to the video. Artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. There’s something called shadow AI, and I’ll go into this in just a tiny bit. But first, I want to address the magnitude of the increasingly important trend of safety and privacy. On October 30th, the Biden administration issued a very comprehensive executive order detailing 150 requirements for the use of AI in federal agencies. This is just months after AI developer companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google voluntarily made the commitment to adhere to certain guardrails for trust and security. This includes having to share safety results with the government before releasing them to the public and meeting certain privacy and security guidelines within 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days of the release of new AI developments. I just want to emphasize that the government made these moves within months, which by federal government standards is unprecedentedly fast. That’s how important safety and privacy are. But given that it’s also the government, we shall see how all of this pans out. Especially in election year. But even right now, businesses are facing huge problems in terms of privacy and security. Many notable companies just straight out banned the usage of AI. And these are like big companies, as well as tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and essentially all the other banks out there too. So this all sounds good in theory, but there’s the problem of shadow AI. Shadow AI refers to the unofficial personal use of AI in the workplace by employees, basically using AI tools like ChatGPT in order to get answers faster and do things more quickly, even though it is banned in the company. In a study by Ernst & Young, 90% of respondents say that they do use AI at work, even the people who worked at companies that technically banned the usage. Clearly, shadow AI is a huge problem. And clearly, you’re not going to be able to stop people from using AI. This is essentially telling students back in the day to not use Wikipedia, except this is like worse with worse consequences if AI hallucinates or something. And then suddenly you lost like $10 billion—not great. Anyways, another increasingly worrisome trend or subtrend within privacy and security is the issue of copyright. There’s a lot of debate on the usage of copyrighted material in order to train AI models, especially with those AI models that are closed source. It’s kind of hard to tell what it uses and what it doesn’t use, right? There’s been a series of lawsuits by the Writers Guild, very prominent celebrities, and even the New York Times that have sued companies like OpenAI and Microsoft for the alleged usage of their own copyrighted material. It is definitely a very hotly debated topic, but collectively, let’s just call it the pushback trends towards generative AI, addressing concerns about security, privacy, and copyright. There are a lot of opportunities in this space because there aren’t very good solutions right now.
In particular, I would recommend looking into open source models and local models that some individuals and companies alike are turning to as opposed to the big AI closed source models from open AI and Google. In order to adapt these open-source models to your needs, definitely also look into things like fine tuning and rag. These are just some of the emerging solutions to address the shadow AI issue. During the gold rush, cell shovels. Allegedly, this is a quote that comes from Mark Twain in reference to the gold rush in the 1800s. There’s a lot of wisdom in this line. In this case, the gold rush is the AI rush, and the people selling the shovels are the people who are directly working on improving and building AI for the AI enthusiasts to use. These include roles like AI researchers, AI engineers, data analysts, data scientists, and ML operations. This study by the World Economics Forum already shows that there’s going to be significant increases in these types of support roles. I’m not going to comment too much, more like, is it going to end up like the rush in which people are disappointed, or is it going to be like a spectacular AI world in the future? But it’s undeniable that this trend is happening. These are the people who are building the tools of the future. Don’t worry, if you also want to sell the shovels, you don’t necessarily have to become like an AI engineer or like a super technical person. Remember the term vertical AI integration that I talked about earlier? So many companies are looking to integrate AI into their businesses, but they don’t know how to do so. So there’s a lot of opportunity to help companies do so. Like I said, this can be like full-blown technical roles like AI or ML engineers. But these days, there’s also a lot of no-code and low-code tools that can help you do this as well. For example, I recently did a consulting gig for a high school in which they wanted me to help them implement a bot that can help teachers grade more quickly. We ended up using a coding solution, but there were a lot of ways that we could implement this with no-code and low-code tools as well. Let me know in the comments if you also like me to go into more low-code and no-code tools, in addition to the more codey stuff that I talk about. I’m not sure what the general coding level of the people who are going to be watching this video is. The future of artificial intelligence is now. All right, coming back to this graph here of the hype cycle for emerging technologies. Over time, we’ll inch our way into the valley of disillusionment. But as new innovations happen and AI trends keep developing, we will slowly inch out of it as well. It’s a future where I think anybody would think it’s very hard to predict what it’s going to look like. But there are some things that we should pay attention to, like, start seeing what’s going to happen in the future. In the past decade or so, there’s been this global technology trend in which a lot of new technologies have been developed in the United States. But the technology actually gets adopted faster in developing countries like China and India.
A recent article that came out in the economics section of India Times had this title: India is the is the highest among countries to have actively deployed AI, according to IBM research. It then says that the IBM Global AI Adoption Index found that 74% of those Indian enterprises are already working with AI, having accelerated their investment in AI in the past 24 months. It seems like this is happening again. Things were created in the US, and now they’re being widely adopted in developing countries like India. So I’m not saying that the future is going to be China or India. But it is interesting to think about, and it is probably worth paying attention to these global AI trends and adoptions. Let me know in the comments if you live in a developing country and maybe you come to the U.S. or North America and you were kind of surprised because the adoption of technology in your country is actually more widespread than where it came from first, which is the U.S.
