2024 in Review: The Year of Inescapable Consumer AI

When taking stock of all the tech news and developments of 2024, we have to pay special attention to AI, which has exploded into the public consciousness. AI of course means many things to many people, and it’s a nebulous term that’s often applied to features or functions that don’t really merit it, just because it gets attention and every company now wants a piece of the pie. Your phones, computers, home appliances, cars, and even online services are being marketed as “AI enabled”, leading many people to ask what exactly is new and how any of this works. Every major hardware and software company, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, Samsung, and plenty of brand new startups are desperate to cash in – or at least to not get left behind.

In 2024, we got major new software features bundled and branded as Samsung Galaxy AI, Apple Intelligence and Microsoft Copilot. The use of AI tools for writing, image manipulation and much more is now normalised, widespread, and unavoidable, leading to some amusing moments but also plenty of misinformation and malicious activity. 

Nearly all manufacturers are pushing the same features and narratives – the ability to edit unwanted subjects out of photos and recompose them, automatic summaries and replies for messages and notifications, real-time translation, image generation based on text prompts or scribbles, contextual search, and conversational voice assistants seem to be common across everyone’s AI promises.

So far, AI features on laptops and smartphones haven’t inspired many people to rush out and replace a perfectly functional device that’s just a year or two old. As long as these features are a tap away, it’s likely that they will be used casually – but we haven’t yet seen whether or how companies plan to monetise such services, and whether users will pay for them, given the choice. It will take time for the majority of people to have such tools at their disposal.

Two high-profile AI hardware products  – the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin – took the world by storm at the beginning of 2024. Both were hyped constantly, promising to completely upend the current paradigm of accessing information through apps on our smartphones. Both, however, flopped completely when they were launched. Reviews were scathing and the general consensus were that neither product works well or serves any real purpose. It seems companies are still figuring out how and when people want to interact with AI in our day-to-day-lives – if we do at all. 

AI is also being pushed as a revolution in personalised computing – our devices and services will learn our habits and present search results that are specific to us. Google’s Gemini can scrape through your Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Keep, and much more to answer extremely specific questions about your life. Microsoft’s controversial Recall feature, which had to be delayed, monitors your PC usage and creates frequent snapshots to be able to grab information about everything you’ve been doing. Apple, on the other hand, is pushing a privacy-first experience with AI processing happening primarily on-device rather than sending data to a server. 

The effects of AI are already being felt in multiple spheres of life. In academia, it’s now increasingly easy to plagiarise or fabricate work. Researchers claim to have solved problems that would have otherwise taken years to compute. Creative workflows are becoming simpler, with tedious tasks such as background separation needing only one click rather than hours of work, and skills that would have required a trained professional now at everyone’s disposal. Large parts of programming and coding are becoming automated, as is the case with content writing.

Does this mean jobs are under threat? Yes, but there’s no need to panic just yet. We’ve already seen many stories about organisations replacing humans with AI, but results have been mixed. We’re likely to see a lot of disruption in industries such as customer service, where voice or text chatbots can replace humans, and in creative fields such as composing music, where skills can be digitally replicated. Many jobs will require fewer people and some will disappear – but we’ve seen this before. We don’t see offices full of stenographers, switchboard operators and draftspeople anymore. Kiosks have replaced many cashiers, and robots have replaced production line workers. Society is changing and we will have to adapt, even if more drastically than before. At least as far as content goes, there should still be some need for human supervision, moderation, and arbitration.

The rise of AI also means we will have to confront some ugly truths – a lot of algorithms have human bias baked in, and a lot of automated content feeds into what we already know, rather than expanding our horizons. Already in 2024, we’ve seen the effects of digital “echo chambers” in amplifying political messages while some of the world’s biggest democracies held elections. 

Scammers are using AI to generate convincing fake voices and videos, and we’ve already seen tragic consequences. The power to generate and manipulate can be used just as easily for malicious purposes as for artistic ones. 

Hopefully, 2025 will see greater shifts in the policy and legal domains to come to terms with this. India’s AI Mission received over ₹10,000 crore in funding this year to advance strategic investments in the field, while MeitY has issued advisories around responsible AI use. More comprehensive regulations are expected to be formulated soon under the expected Digital India Act.

The EU’s AI Act came into effect this August, imposing transparency requirements, banning systems that automate discrimination or are designed to manipulate humans, and regulating “high-risk” applications. US President Biden issued an executive order governing responsible AI development and news.

Meanwhile, AI is big business. Nvidia, which makes today’s most powerful and popular hardware for AI processing, surpassed a $3 trillion market cap and briefly overtook Apple to become the world’s most valuable company in 2024. After a tumultuous 2023, industry leader OpenAI reinvented itself this year, leaving its non-profit roots behind to pursue the massive market for AI tools (and causing multiple senior researchers to quit in protest, taking their expertise elsewhere).

While 2024 will be seen as a foundational year in the history of consumer AI, we’ve really only taken baby steps so far. Things are about to get very interesting, not only in terms of technology but also how our society adapts to it.