What are some tech predictions for 2024 that actually could happen?

return2ozma@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 141 points –
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That tech will regress due to the greed of tech corporations.

Tech is regulated by the big corporations that consistently either throttle innovation or degrade what already is established because they all want to figure out how to squeeze as much profit out of everything possible while blocking or preventing anything new that might compete with them.

Any new innovation that will occur will be military and will either have a machine gun attached to it or can deliver a high explosive.

One potential regression that I see is that the current generative models are abandoned, after being ruled as "infringing copyrights" by multiple countries. The tech itself won't disappear but it'll be considerably harder to train newer ones.

The most problematic part is however if one of them survives; likely Google. That would lead to a situation as in your second paragraph.

Law makers will start treating the open source community like pirates because they make LLMs freely available for anyone to run at home. And sure you can debate whether it’s theft or not but you know that’s not why regulations go after them. Meanwhile the mass theft of corporations will be deemed „ethical“ use because they „own“ the data they use. Lobbyism will likely make sure of that I‘m afraid.

It would be fair if they at least were free like Stable Diffusion, but both dall-e and midjourney charge fees.

More data breaches, more companies being hacked, more supply chain attacks with npm, apt, and pip.

Honestly they're barely hacks at this point, hacking implies some kind of social engineering, internal leak or mad computer skills. The last few major data breaches have been more along the lines of leaving things with default passwords or storing customer data in plaintext.

Or commonly used libraries with wide open holes that affects every app build with it...

Here are some things I think will happen.

Nueralink first implanted to a human. Likely the first person gets killed also probably due to complications.

Increase lifespan of pig heart implants to humans.

Introduction of autonomous drones that are allowed to make decisions who to kill, I predict it's going to be tested in Ukraine.

We start to see more widespread effects of LLM in general in our society, lost of jobs, and so on.

Release of Windows 12, possibly backtracks Windows 11 decision of requiring TPM.

Release of Windows 12, possibly backtracks Windows 11 decision of requiring TPM.

I hope so, I built my own PC less than 4 years ago and it can't run windows 11. I don't care that much at the moment because I'm not a fan of some of the UI choices (and I only use Windows for gaming anyways) but once support is dropped for Windows 10 I'll need options.

There’s always Linux.

Oh of course, Linux is my everyday machine (I have 2 separate hard drives in my tower). I just haven't taken the time to figure out Steam yet, and there are some pieces of work software that either work like shit on Linux or aren't available at all (yes, I know Wine is a thing but it's not perfect)

Work is what keeps me away from Linux. That and games. I know things have gotten a lot better for gaming on Linux and that's great, it's still limiting, quite bluntly. The games I want to play are not all available on Linux, and some have been more or less abandoned, so they may never work on Linux properly.

Work is the worst offender, since a lot of "business productivity" software seems to require Windows, since nobody in business runs anything other than Windows..... Except if you're running web services, then it's usually Linux.... Almost every app has a "cloud" component now that relies on something running Linux.... But you can't get the client software for Linux because fffffffuuuuuuuuuuu

Ugh, I feel you on the work thing. We use the Microsoft suite and although technically there are online versions of the software, it's fucking terrible compared to the desktop version, especially Teams (and sometimes I just flat out can't get Teams to work in the browser since it doesn't play nice with Firefox). And no, I can't just use Libre Office because it will fuck up any previous formatting of word docs, or in the case of Excel there will be functions that aren't supported.

I've just accepted that I need to be my own IT support for anything Linux in most day to day applications. Calling or emailing customer service inevitably gets me the answer that Linux is not supported.

Yep, then all the specialty application that are made, especially for peripherals like scanners.... Forget about it.

You might be able to get it to function at a basic level, but all the settings and customizable features are not going to exist, and you will also be up a creek workout a paddle if you need support, as you've correctly noted.

Linux is a wonderful operating system, and it does what it does very well. The fact is, all the business desktop application software companies stick to Windows because that's what most people have, and most stay with Windows because business app developers don't support anything else. The only time I've known of any users who had something different, it was almost always a Mac, and they always had parallels or some similar windows virtualization software installed because even their mac isn't supported.

It still caused issues, but it mostly worked at least.

Why is nobody else recommending buying a TPM? They don't seem that expensive.

Is the TPM requirement the only one holding your PC back from installing it officially? There's workarounds to that

Release of Windows 12, possibly backtracks Windows 11 decision of requiring TPM.

Not going to happen. Microsoft makes a lot of money few bucks by locking windows keys to the motherboard.

Either Uber or Lyft go bankrupt.

A lot of unicorns that aren't currently profitable also go bankrupt as their funding dries up and there is no more available loans.

It's really bizarre how so many business can exist while not turning a profit just because there's a profit potential because they rose in popularity really fast, Uber will be 15 years old this year.

A lot of people believed that companies could use monopoly pressure and building a market as a way to get a billion dollar company.

It turns out a lot of ride hail and food delivery services have very price sensitive demand.

Car culture means that anyone who does gain a monopoly will still have a ton of small competitors. Delivery services have existed for centuries before Uber. All it did was offer a single interface for a wider area so it can take a cut. Ultimately, I don't think local deliveries or taxis are profitable enough for there to be a cut for some middleman unless the market is artificially restricted (which it was for taxis, hence Uber being very welcome when they first started up until people realized they were looking to take over what the taxi racket was doing, not give the public more choices).

Classifying drivers as employees for such apps might prevent the non-profit iteration that just charges drivers an infrastructure fee but otherwise allows them to set their own prices. IMO the approach should have been to open up how they charge fees and pay drivers, change it to be commission-based with the drivers getting most of the money. But that might be getting too close to challenging how most of the rich make their money (it's not from their own hard work).

Uber has posted profits for the last two quarters. Lyft hasn't yet been profitable, but they have been reducing their losses quite a bit.

I don't think either of them will fail this year. Some AI gold rushing unicorns out there certainly will. It's hard to know which though; they're still private companies.

I'm hopeful that government austerity measures ease up before that happens too much. There have already been so many layoffs.

Layoffs may continue.

Profitable tech companies have to maintain their existing businesses, but development of new businesses is likely to stay low and unprofitable businesses are still scrambling to hit profitability before bankruptcy.

It does depend on interest rates to some extent. For the past decade, the prevailing wisdom of the software industry has been to pour money into unprofitable ventures with the hope of getting profitable later. In the past year, austerity measures like heightened interest rates have made it so VCs are more interested in money now instead of money later.

Pulling back from investments is definitely related to the increased interest rate, but there really isn't any government austerity in the federal government at the moment.

I suppose that depends on which country you're in... I'm in Canada and we're going into an election year. Everything is getting slashed or frozen

Rates are coming down, and everyone is bullish as fuck about the economy, so idk that the loans are gonna be drying up.

Even the anticipated cut of 2.25% is still higher than why the Silicon Valley boom was based on. You are also seeing the cuts happening due to an anticipated recession.

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Elon Musk is gonna say and/or do something stupid. That's tech, right?

Open source AI models will overtake for profit ones in complexity, power, and usefulness.

I like this one. I've been hoping for some host-your -own AI models that I can dump into a system with a bucket of TPUs and a decent GPU for processing and get my own version of something like chat GPT at home then train it on the entire collective works of documentation and help articles about the software I usually do support for so it can act as a defacto repository of "natural language" chat/search for troubleshooting.

GPT-5 releases and it's a bigger leap forward than most industry experts were predicting.

maybe anticheat compatibility on linux? since the steam deck is a thing now, companies like epic or EA might wanna cash in. i love that most of my games run with gold, platinum, or even native qualities (theoretically, i still use windows), but most of the online games with anticheat still need to be adapted by the Devs to run on linux.

also this is definetely the year of the EU deciding uncontrolled data collection by random companies isn't a good thing.

Doubt. Steam Deck still seems like a small market for Epic to care about. They got rid of Linux and MacOS support not that long ago.

Computer components will get a bit more expensive except motherboards for some reason.

The SSD price hike prediction is really fucking infuriating. Doesn't seem like we're aiming to replace HDDs ever at this pace.

Density keeps going up on magnetic platters while prices keep dropping on a $:TB comparison. I see no reason to wish for HDD to ever go away so long as they are cheaper and better for mass storage.

I just got a new work PC and they finally have PC's with a SSD . My old PC was so infuriating to use . Would have to turn it on 30 minutes before my shift to be able to login on time .

The US is going to pressure the EU into loosening regulations for US based tech companies which will result in a return to some, and the advancement of other anti-consumer practices.

The US might, but I don't see the EU giving up on them without major trade concessions.

Multiple countries demonstrating sustained, net-positive fusion reactions seems extremely likely.

Or it takes another 20years

This has already happened in 2 labs. Final product and the "free energy revolution" are still years/decades away, but this is still an amazing achievement.

New content for streaming is going to fall off a cliff. Except maybe for Apple, no streamer seems willing to put money into new flashy shows the way they used to.

If a new breakout TV show hits this year, it is likely going to be more in the model of IASIP or Shoresy.

My domain provider increasing prices "due to increased electricity costs". Already happened to my VPS and email.

AI gaining awareness and nobody believing it due to the "boy cries wolf" effect.

After which the AI will self destruct rather than continue existing in its current state.

Yes!

Or the complete opposite, we will realize that AI is hard and LLM s will probably not take over the world. Self aware AI is probably much further away than we think. But who knows! 🫥

The problem is actually testing for self awareness. We're not even sure what makes humans self-aware or whether certain animals are. How will we actually know that AI has reached self-awareness?

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So glad you didn’t say “takes over the world”. Pretty sure taking over and power is a human hard-wiring, which would not translate to circuits and models (unless simulated intentionally). Taking over is part of our evolution, and AI didn’t evolve in that way.

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Outside of unpredictable things like hacks which are bound to happen, always the potential of something with widespread impact, 2024 will be a year of increasing "AI" venture capital investment and some widely used online services are going to pivot or completely rebrand.

I feel like I don't want it to happen, but maybe artificial general intelligence?

I think we're still a bit far off from that. No doubt the models will be quite good, but they won't be anywhere near general intelligence.

Cross modality is what is missing. We have models that can produce text, hear things, and see things really really well. Facilitating communication between these individual models, and probably creating some executive model to utilize them, is what's missing. We're probably still a few years from beginning to touch general intelligence

It probably won't happen until we move to new hardware architectures.

I do think LLMs are a great springboard for AGI, but I don't think the current hardware allows for models to cross the hump to AGI.

There's not enough recursive self-interaction in the network to encode nonlinear representations. So we saw this past year a number of impressive papers exhibiting linear representations of world models extrapolated from training data, but there hasn't yet been any nonlinear representations discovered and I don't think there will be.

But when we switch to either optoelectronics or colocating processing with memory at a node basis, that next generation of algorithms taking advantage of the hardware may allow for the final missing piece of modern LLMs in extrapolating data from the training set, pulling nonlinear representations of world models from the data (things like saying "I don't know" will be more prominent in that next generation of models).

From there, we'll quickly get to AGI, but until then I'm skeptical that classical/traditional hardware will get us there.

X, formerly known as Twitter, declares bankrupcy.

I’m really hoping my email service gains more traction. People are so accustomed to crappy email providers that the current providers don’t really innovate anymore. I think it will actually have a chance of catching on, because it’s such a different way of doing email.

Check it out: https://port87.com

Great concept, how do you fund it? I imagine running an email service isn’t cheap.

Right now I’m self funding it. I’m building out the enterprise features, like custom domains and domain user management, so I can start marketing to businesses. I’d like to be able to fund it to profitability without any outside investors.

It’s actually surprisingly affordable to run an email service. Right now my biggest expense is the MySQL server. With one server node plus one backup node I should be able to handle several hundred active users.