In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about finding its use cases in biz

If 2023 was a year of wonder about artificial intelligence, 2024 was the year to try to get that wonder to do something useful without breaking the bank. There was a shift from putting out models to actually building products, said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton University computer science professor and co-author of the new book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell The Difference. The first 100 million or so people who experimented with ChatGPT upon its release two years ago actively sought out the chatbot, finding it amazingly helpful at some tasks or laughably mediocre at others. Now such generative AI technology is baked into an increasing number of technology services whether we're looking for it or not for instance, through the AI-generated answers in Google search results or new AI techniques in photo editing tools. The main thing that was wrong with generative AI last year is that companies were releasing these really powerful mod