In case you’re ready for the hubbub over generative AI to die down, perhaps pull up a chair. The excitement round synthetic intelligence reveals no indicators of quieting—a reality that can grow to be all too apparent at this yr’s CES.
CES, the patron electronics business’s largest annual gathering within the US, is returning to Las Vegas on January 9. It’s a large, four-day-long bustling bazaar of tech, with expo halls crammed to the brim with new devices, hopeful startups, and prototypes that attain for the celebrities. CES is a commerce present the place gross sales and distribution offers are inked, the place idea automobiles roll by means of crowded streets, and the place tech journalists and showgoers alike wander the flooring on the lookout for the standout new merchandise. And this yr, most of the merchandise debuting are going to be garnished with heaping globs of AI.
For years, generative AI expertise bubbled beneath the floor of public consciousness. It lastly burst into the limelight in November 2022, when OpenAI launched the primary iteration of ChaptGPT. The arrival of the shiny new chatbot kicked off an AI arms race. For the reason that reverberant waves of this eruption hadn’t but totally saturated the tech business by the point final yr’s CES happened, there wasn’t actually a complete lot of GenAI speak in Las Vegas final January. Consequently, CES 2023 seems virtually primitive in hindsight, arriving a scant six weeks behind the best technological revolution for the reason that cell phone.
That gained’t be the case in 2024. “We didn’t get the complete CES hearth hose of AI bulletins final yr like we’re going to have,” says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Technique. “In case you thought it was a wave final yr, it’ll be a tsunami this yr.”
Anticipate to see AI in all places at CES: in automobiles, scooters, headphones, cameras, audio system, and televisions. In some instances, these merchandise will merely embody one other approach to entry a ChatGPT-style question-and-response service to deal with spoken instructions. However in different instances, the advances might really feel extra impactful. Firms like Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD are anticipated to announce chips that assist AI companies on the units that carry them. These chips would course of AI duties domestically, with out having to ship a request to a server within the cloud after which look forward to a response, making issues like laptop imaginative and prescient, voice-to-text companies, and generative computing really feel snappier.
CES is the place the narrative round business tendencies is formed. Sag says that’s what’s prone to occur with the abundance of AI this CES. “AI is simply going to overwhelm all the things,” Sag says. “It will likely be so prevalent and so dominant that some folks will simply be sick of it.”
