2024’s AI product explosion; good, bad, and hallucinatory
The generative AI explosion of the last couple of years hasn’t slowed in 2024. There’s been a slew of new products employing large language models and an almost daily blast of some new feature or tool for the existing services.
ChatGPT is more powerful and has a new voice mode en route, Google Gemini is appearing everywhere from Gmail to Google Drive, and even Apple finally jumped into the AI (or Apple Intelligence) arena.
Then there are the startups from Suno to Rabbit who are finding innovative ways to play with AI models, both their own and those built by the market’s mainstays, with plenty more anticipated for the rest of the year.
As we’re exactly halfway through 2024, we’ve selected some of the most impressive, notable, and possibly infamous AI releases of the year that you can play around with today. Below that, we’ve also picked out a couple more AI innovations that aren’t out yet but should be available before the end of the year. AI in 2024: what launches have mattered the most so far this year?ChatGPT
ChatGPT has been the default term for the wave of generative AI products using large language models. However, OpenAI hasn’t relied on that to stay ahead of the competition and has been regularly augmenting the AI chatbot and its linked services this year.
In 2024, ChatGPT gained a Memory feature that lets it adjust its behavior based on previous interactions, plus a Read Aloud feature for turning those answers into an audio performance in 37 languages and five voices. Customization is also central to the GPT Store, launched in January, where users can build and play with customized versions of ChatGPT focused on specific tasks.
In less good news, OpenAI got into a public spat with Scarlett Johansson over the similarity of its ‘Sky’ voice to the actress’s in the movie Her, and it’s since had to delay its planned voice mode upgrade to sometime in “the fall”. ChatGPT also experience a couple of major outages in June.Google Gemini
At the beginning of the year, Google Gemini only referred to the family of models built by Google. It wasn’t until February that Google threw out the Bard branding it had used and made all of its generative AI projects fall under the Gemini umbrella.
Some of those new and improved features appear to be about catching up to ChatGPT, with image generation tools (briefly taken down after some bizarre hallucination issues) and the Gems store that offers custom chatbots a la the GPT Store.
