AI today and trends for an AI future

A survey of experts on: How are early adopters using AI today? Where is AI going in 2024?

It’s been 419 days since ChatGPT launched. Since then, so many AI startups have been funded. We were also blessed with 419 straight days of AI influencers shilling every AI breakthrough.

But how close are we to the AI future we dream of? How far along the AI adoption cycle are we?

I wanted to find out. I surveyed 23 of my most AI-knowledgeable friends on their thoughts on AI today. They are all amazing and smarter than I am. Some are startup founders, some work at the best companies, and some are investors. I’m deeply grateful for their help to make this possible.

Here are my main takeaways and some visualizations of the survey.

Main takeaways

1. It’s still so early

   ChatGPT is still the most used app. (40% of respondents mentioned it as an app they use most frequently). AI is likely going to be a 5 to 10-year adoption cycle. There are still only 1-2 dominant players in each application area or modality (text, audio, image, video, etc.) so far. We are still only building for our own use cases as engineers (almost 30% of respondents use AI for coding use cases). We haven’t even picked the low-hanging fruit yet for non-techie use cases.

2. There’s not enough signal and there’s too much noise

   Even though so many people are tweeting, there are still not enough novel AI demos and original thoughts on Twitter. People don’t know what’s possible or even what to build. There are not enough consistent builders or founders to follow closely even on Twitter. (>50% of respondents didn’t name who was doing the most interesting things with AI). This is your sign to start building and writing new ideas :)

3. People are excited about multimodal apps

   Most of the focus for startups and tinkerers was on LLMs and infra this last year. As image, video, and audio models become more accessible, we can predict a shift towards more multimodal apps next year. (22.7% of respondents said multimodal use cases are what they are most excited about for 2024).

Overall, AI optimism continues to grow. I started building AI apps around July 2022. Back then, it felt like there was so much to explore. Today, it somehow feels like there’s even more low-hanging fruit.

Survey Results

What do you do for work?

What AI products or apps do you use frequently?

What do you use AI products or apps for?

What’s the coolest demo you’ve seen recently?

What’s the coolest AI company you know?

What AI companies, infra, or products do you wish someone would build that don't exist today?

What infra provider do you use to host or manage your AI models?

What's your favorite LLM / text model or provider?

What are you most excited about next in AI?

We live in exciting times.

Best,

David