Explore how AI integration and global technology trends reshaped 2024, as Tom Snyder of RIoT highlights pivotal advancements and challenges in the tech world.
This time last year, I claimed that 2023 was the first full rebound year after the pandemic. This year, the pandemic felt like it was in the distant rear view. Our world was dominated by horserace election coverage, continuing wars overseas and an absolute tidal wave of AI.
At my organization, RIoT, 2024 was "busy as usual." We welcomed tech delegations from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Columbia, Burundi, India and Senegal to name a few. Engagements with France, Czech Republic and Burundi are already on tap for Q1 this year. Our workshops, events and RIoT Underground Podcast continue to educate thousands of people annually. We are fortunate to be able to share how organizations large and small are creating technology to improve our world. A few notable examples:
● American Cancer Society - transforming how cancer patients navigate the complex journey of medical, emotional and educational support during treatment.
● National Renewable Energy Lab - catalyzing breakthroughs in clean energy with novel innovation contests and regional ecosystem building.
● SAS - dramatically reducing industrial workplace injuries with smart vision systems
The RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP) worked with 21 early-stage companies in three cohorts in NC and VA. [Aside - applications are open until January 17th for the next cycle of RAP]. I continue to be impressed by the ambition that entrepreneurs demonstrate every single day, to apply technology for the betterment of society. Helping them to scale commercially, so they can impart greater impact is an absolute privilege.
I'll share just a snippet of the cutting-edge startup technology we were able to support this year:
● OsRostrum - vision analytics to determine cow health through 3D hoof scans. Paired with traditional industry breeding techniques helps farmers to have healthier herds.
● Praana Tech - positron emission receiver technology developed at CERN enables multiple order of magnitude improvement on the cost and size of PET scanners for medial imaging.
● Predicate - using natural language processing in healthcare settings to predict and prevent sepsis, with data from 5 continents to remove genetic biases of more narrow data sets.
● Swabbot - deploying advanced, miniaturized robotics to inspect pharmaceutical manufacturing tanks. They create two-fold safety, preventing contamination batch-to-batch while keeping inspectors outside the tanks, which can be deadly to inspect.
● AnswerThis - accelerating research advancement with a powerful AI transformer model that 100x's literature reviews, focusing researchers on conducting new work and not duplicating already completed work.
● Social Cascade - creating stronger trust between patients and healthcare practices through education and social media engagement.
I am excited to share that 2024 came with a number of new initiatives that will only expand our reach in the future. We were awarded as one of five DARPA Commercial Accelerators, supporting the commercial application of DARPA funded research. We have just entered into a multi-year contract with the Small Business Administration to manage an IoT and Data Economy cluster, recognizing our region is the national center of excellence for AI and Data. And we continue to build technology testbed capabilities, with our latest project being a SmartAg facility in Wilson, NC with support from the USDA, NC IDEA and a number of other partners.
While RIoT has been busy just in our local ecosystem, no "Year in Review" article would be complete without also looking at the national and global picture.
Here are what I believe were the biggest tech stories of 2024.
One bug in a Crowdstrike software update caused more than $10B in damages with the click of a mouse. More than 50% of Fortune 1000 companies were disrupted, 5,000 flights canceled and 911 and hospital systems were shut down in countries around the world. Through good fortune (and a bit of luck), a single Microsoft developer discovered and averted a massive malware issue in xzUtils, a core part of Linux Open Source code that is in 84% of mobile devices and 100% of Apple products. It is risky for more and more of society to be built on fewer and fewer technology platforms, but despite these two major incidents, there seems to be no end to the trend.
Generative AI hit the mainstream two years ago, but 2024 was the year of integration. No longer is GenAI just a tool to use independently of traditional workflows. This year the tool has become fully integrated into search, into enterprise systems and increasingly into purpose-built hardware products. The old adage used to be "you can choose not to use AI, but you cannot choose to not have AI used on you." While the second part of the phrase remains true, the first part is getting harder and harder to avoid.
NVIDIA's market cap increased from $1.2T to $3.3T in a single year, bolstered mostly by their Blackwell chip architecture which has become the gold standard for AI. The company is now valued higher than Microsoft. Demand goes beyond data centers. Gartner predicts more than 43% of PC's will be AI enabled in 2025. Demand for processor chips has outstripped supply, leaving AI applications waiting for compute capacity to come online.
Beyond the commercial reality of the scaling of AI, we are facing practical challenges of energy, materials and heat. The current trend is to build globe-scale data centers. A number of the newer projects individually consume more energy than a mid-sized state, like Oklahoma. Providing sufficient power, and then cooling off the resulting heat of the processors is putting pressure to advance optical computing (low heat) and quantum computing (improved computational density). But these are still years from the mainstream.
AI detection company, Originality AI recently did a study determining that more than 50% of posts on LinkedIn are not created by profile owners, but rather are AI generated posts. [The percentage of authentic versus AI-generated posts increases with post length, so if you want to avoid AI-generated content, stop reading the longer posts].
Despite extremely conclusive evidence that China and Russia are populating social media with misinformation and propaganda, large swaths of society continue to be duped. It is increasingly difficult to sift the signal from the noise and 2024 showed that tech and media companies are more likely to embrace the chaos than to prioritize truth.
The overturn of the Chevron decision by the Supreme Court takes regulatory policy setting away from scientists, physicians and subject matter experts, instead putting it into the hands of politicians. Piece by piece our society is replacing facts and data with hype and profit-boosting. I would bet that never in our history has society had a more fearful view of emerging technology - and why not, with all the mistrust this reduction of veracity imbues. It will be interesting to see if AI is powerful enough to cut through the noise, or if it will be so deeply trained by bad data that misinformation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After the holiday break, I'll offer predictions of the top tech stories and advances that will dominate discussion in 2025 - hopefully sifting the truth from the hype.