The Six Five team discusses the Top Tech Trends 2024.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: But Pat, let’s take the first few minutes and just give what is your 2024? This year was gen AI. And if you guessed that, you’re right, what’s 2024? What’s the tech trends of ’24 that you’re going to be looking for?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s going to come no surprise that AI for 2024 is going to be front and center, but before I dive into that, I want to make sure that people see the gamut of it. I think that we’re going to see a quantum evolution next year with real value to the enterprise, or to scientists. I think the hybrid multi-cloud progression is going to get, we’re going to see more fabrics and those fabrics going from 1.0 to 2.0 for enterprises to lean into it. And what I mean is regardless of where you’re running your workload, whether it’s in your on-prem data center, whether it’s on your data center edge, let’s say you’re a retailer or a manufacturer, a sovereign cloud, public cloud, being able to manage core services like applications, like networking, various forms of security, you’re going to see those start making a much bigger impact.
And then we’re going to see, dare I say the metaverse, right? We are going to see, I think it’s still going to be in experimentation time, right? You have an Apple headset that’s a thousand bucks, $3,000 and more of an ISV and developer vehicle and looky-loo. But I do think that is going to be the next generation of experiences. And whether it’s five years out, 10 years out, I can’t tell you exactly once we get to a 100 to $300 headset that does everything that Apple’s does, Meta will be a player. But I’ll give you most of your time on AI, but most of value capture today is on the picks and shovels, the chips, the infrastructure that processes and moves that data. And there are certain companies who got credit, the NVIDIAs, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, Microsoft with OpenAI, and even enterprise players like IBM and Salesforce.
But the next wave is going to be all that, but bigger, and have more people participate, right? We’re going to see AI PCs, AI PC chips. So we’re going to see Intel, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft with Windows. We’re going to see infrastructure at the edge so folks like HPE. We’re going to see AI smartphones and AI chips, the Qualcomms, the Skyworks, and then finally the SASs of the world who haven’t necessarily participated in this financially, the Adobes and even the Boxes. So yeah, that’s it. We have AI, more AI, quantum evolutions, the hybrid multi-cloud progression with more fabrics, and an evolution of the metaverse. While it won’t be mainstream, we’re going to learn a lot.
Daniel Newman: So much there, Pat. Thanks so much for giving us the little bit of predictions to the future. Look, I’m not going to take any risks and even begin to proclaim that there is another topic besides AI because there’s not. Nothing else will be top of mind or front and center. Now again, all of the infrastructure and parts that make AI happen are going to continue to need to be invested in. Where AI happens will continue to be a conversation, cloud, edge, somewhere in between. But here’s my three big predictions for next year.
Responsibility and trustworthiness of AI. I shared a picture this week, this morning on Twitter to a lot of acclaim of a person that negotiated with a chatbot to buy a Chevy Tahoe for a dollar. Look, it’s probably not a binding contract. The fact of the matter is that people are going to continue to look for ways to take advantage of enterprises, companies, businesses that are going to be using chatbots to create binding relationships. Not to mention that the grounding and trustworthiness of the responses, we’re going to need to continue to work on that. Companies are going to need to figure out how to do this correctly. I like indemnification, I like the companies like Microsoft and IBM and Google have all talked about this, but how about better than indemnifying actually making this stuff work correctly? That would be better. And so this will be a big focus of the next year is going to be building grounded vector databases that stack with knowledge graphs that are accurate and can be trusted for accurate outputs. One.
Two, monetization. You alluded to this, Pat, but this was a year that was all about hand waving and chest puffing. Only a couple of companies actually meaningfully benefited from this AI wave. Everyone else actually saw revenue declines, even if the part of their business benefited from AI. Think about all the infrastructure companies and server companies that saw massive declines in CPU servers, sold GPUs but still didn’t even offset it to the point where they were growing. These companies are going to need to really figure out their AI stories and they’re going to need to get above water on AI. And by the way, I do think some of it’s going to be through rotation back to traditional compute CPUs and accelerators that will actually be used to inference AI because it won’t all be done on really high-priced GPUs. And that brings me to my third big projection and can’t wait to be over in Davos to spend all my time talking about this, Pat.
By the way, there’s some hand waving. Hand waving. Sustainability, and not sustainability from the lens of the 2020 and 2021 version of that. I kind of find that to all be nonsense at this point, but it’s going to be, the fact is of 1 to 2% of the world’s power is being consumed by data centers right now. We do need to figure out a way if we’re going to continue to exponentially grow the utilization of AI, large language models, training models and GPUs, it’s going to be important that we find that balance with lower power, more sustainable, higher performance variance.
So this is going to come down to our friends in the silicon industry, Pat, you and I’ll talk a lot about this, and then optimizing these workloads to deliver more sustainable outputs. The world is watching. This is one of those true cases where the utilization of power while building high performance needs to match, and we need to be using the best and most optimized silicon and applications to deliver more efficiency because this is only going to grow. The demand and use is only going to grow, so those are my three. There’s a lot of other things we could predict on, Pat.
Oh, I got one more. I think the Cybertruck is hideous. I think it’s a failure, I do. And by the way, I like Elon Musk, so this is not a Dan doesn’t like Tesla or Elon thing. This is like I’m driving around Austin and I saw pictures of this thing online. I’m like, “That thing is bad to the bone.” Then I went to the gym last night and I saw one sitting there. And by the way, the siding on this thing, the material that it’s made out of, looks like you know those refrigerators, they get all the smudges on them? You get the stainless steel with the smudging and you can’t get the smudging off? There’s going to be a lot of guys that are going to have their wives yelling at them because they got smudges all over the side of their Cybertruck and I don’t think they come off. But anyways, so.
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t know, man. I saw one on the road, and I want one just because it’s so unique and different.
Daniel Newman: God, I’m probably going to have to pop your tires or something.
Patrick Moorhead: I don’t think you can.
Daniel Newman: It’s not going to be unique though.
Patrick Moorhead: Can’t you shoot the tires?
Daniel Newman: Not going to be unique when there’s 2 million of these things running around looking all dystopian and all over Austin. I mean I can’t wait until it becomes the Uber of choice. You’re going to have the Uber Cybertruck. It’s going to be its own Uber category. It’s going to be like-
Patrick Moorhead: Like $120,000, right?
Daniel Newman: What’s that?
Patrick Moorhead: It’s 120 grand.
Daniel Newman: What’s that matter? I mean, and when I went to Amsterdam, the Tesla S has been the taxi for the last 10 years. So you know what? Maybe we’re right.
Patrick Moobrhead: 40 grand, 120 grand, no difference.
Daniel Newman: Truck’s not here, man. We’re here to make proclamations. I want Tesla to do well, I want Elon to do well. I don’t have any issue there. I just think the truck’s ugly.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I think it is ugly.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
