AI News Round-Up 2024: TechRepublic’s 10 Biggest Stories That Dominated the Year

Generative AI became ubiquitous in 2024, becoming a fixture in laptops, smartphones, and everyday tech. With the rise of multimodal models, generative AI broke new ground, processing text, video, images, and audio — and even delivering outputs seamlessly combining these formats.

As 2024 approaches, TechRepublic revisits the biggest generative AI stories of the year.

1. NVIDIA AI architecture sold out

NVIDIA was a clear winner in the AI space this year. Introduced in March, the Blackwell chip became the gold standard in GPU microarchitecture for processing large amounts of information. Blackwell enables AI training, research, and computing for Amazon Web Services, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI, among others. As of October, Blackwell chips sold out through the following year, as these processors were popular purchases among companies.

In March, sales of NVIDIA’s Hopper chips helped the company reach $2 trillion in market capitalization. NVIDIA became one of the three most valuable companies worldwide, alongside Microsoft and Apple. AMD and Intel also provide AI accelerator chips, although their businesses haven’t experienced the same explosive growth as NVIDIA’s.

Within the broader generative AI industry, the success of these powerful processors is just one of many ripple effects driven by the growing demand for larger, higher-density data centers.

2. OpenAI showed its secretive o1

Many major AI companies moved forward with enterprise offerings, more powerful models, and experimented with new hardware this year. For OpenAI, whispers circulated about a “Strawberry” model that would take the next leap toward humanlike intelligence. Strawberry turned out to be OpenAI o1, a “reasoning” model intended to take more time to crunch thornier problems than its predecessors in the GPT-4 family.

3. The AI PC became mainstream

Tech buffs may reflect on 2024 as the year AI became a standard feature in nearly every new PC. From Apple Intelligence to Microsoft Copilot, built-in AI was everywhere. In September 2024, Gartner predicted AI PCs would make up 43% of all PC shipments by 2025.

However, a November article in Reuters found that PC demand remained low overall — although NVIDIA’s AI processors being on backorder may have limited the availability of AI PCs.

4. Did AI bring a new way of thinking about UI?

Since the debut of the Apple Store in 2008, apps have been the primary way consumers interact with smart devices. Voice assistants like Siri have added another convenience layer, enabling users to control certain applications through voice commands. The AI industry wants the next stage to be seamless control of all aspects of a PC or phone through AI, as demonstrated by Microsoft Copilot and Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s Computer Use feature.

Computer Use with Claude allows AI to translate natural language instructions into actionable commands, such as moving cursors, typing, and interacting with a computer like a human would. However, this functionality can be resource-intensive. For example, performing a simple task like opening a URL and extracting information from a website can cost as much as $0.31 in tokens.

5. Microsoft Recall was delayed repeatedly

Microsoft Recall sparked controversy from the outset due to its unlimited access between Copilot and the rest of the PC, raising security concerns. Once planned for a public preview in June, early access to Recall was delayed until October and then December. Recall was intended to be a cornerstone of Microsoft AI PCs, but Microsoft’s delays in pursuit of “a secure and trusted experience” show that Recall pushed the boundaries of what consumers are willing to share with AI.

6. ChatGPT adds ‘search’ option

In October, OpenAI expanded ChatGPT with a Google-like search engine functionality. ChatGPT search provides generative answers with links to external sites. Adding up-to-date information like weather reports could give OpenAI a competitive edge over Google search. OpenAI made deals with several media outlets to license their content to appear in ChatGPT searches.

Initially, only ChatGPT Plus and Team users had access to ChatGPT search. However, in December, the tech giant made it available to all users.

7. Apple Intelligence launched

Apple kept quiet during much of the AI race, waiting until 2024 to unveil its plans. Apple Intelligence was announced in June for newer devices. In cooperation with OpenAI, Apple added many standard AI capabilities, such as summarization and rewriting. It also brings limited image creation, mostly in cartoony styles to avoid the possibility of users making deepfakes.

Apple Intelligence uses the tech giant’s M-series chips or the A17 Pro chip or later. As of iOS 18.2, Apple devices can connect to ChatGPT to handle more complex questions posed to Apple Intelligence or Siri.

8. Google explored Gemini use cases for enterprise

Google Gemini wasn’t a new development for 2024. However, its launch in December 2023 and the release of a smaller model, Gemma, in February means most of Gemini’s public life happened this year. Google replaced its Bard brand with the more powerful model, bringing Gemini to search, mobile apps, Chromebooks, and the Vertex AI cloud platform. Following the “agentic” AI trend, Google released custom “Gems” in August.

9. AI regulation continued to develop

In 2024, governments worked to regulate AI use. In Europe, the European Union’s AI Act went into effect in August, outlining banned uses while trying to provide guidelines to foster innovation.

The U.K. created an AI assurance market to pursue business in the generative AI sector, with more legislation expected next year. The U.K. joined several international initiatives with the U.S. and others to standardize AI safety.

In the U.S.:

SEE: Seven new AI research and development facilities will open across Europe starting in 2026 thanks to the High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking.

10. Video generation technology matured

Generative AI video remains imperfect, often producing uncanny results with inconsistent scenes and oddly proportioned or distorted limbs. However, that hasn’t stopped companies from releasing AI video generators.

OpenAI’s Sora, first demonstrated in February, was released to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users in December. Google’s Veo is available to select Google Cloud customers. Even Canva offers AI video generation.