AAIA's AI Beat Newsletter: Atlanta, GA, USA Chapter online event, handpicked stories/reports: AI predictions for 2025, OpenAI's Altman “confident we know how to build AGI,” and small language models

AI in business and the enterprise news:

Recent AI news stories that caught our (and Perplexity AI’s!) eye over the last week:

• NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Keynote at CES 2025 (YouTube, January 6, 2025)

  • “Watch NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveil groundbreaking RTX 50 series GPUs powered by the Blackwell architecture. Witness revolutionary advancements in AI, accelerated computing, and industrial digitalization transforming every industry.”

• What’s next for generative AI in 2025? (ComputerWorld, December 31, 2024)

  • “In 2025, enterprises are expected to prioritize strategy, add business-IT partnerships to assist with genAI projects and move from large language model (LLM) pilots to production instances. And small language models will also likely come into their own, addressing specific tasks without overburdening data center processing and power.”

  • “The rise of small and mid-sized language models should enable customers to better meet the trade-offs on accuracy, speed and costs, said Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice president analyst with Gartner Research, noting that “Most organizations are still struggling to realize business value from their genAI investment.””

• 12 AI predictions for 2025 (CIO, December 30, 2024, h/t to the AI Music Newsletter, https://aimusicnewsletter.substack.com)

  • “According to a Bank of America survey of global research analysts and strategists released in September, 2024 was the year of ROI determination, and 2025 will be the year of enterprise AI adoption. “Over the next five to 10 years, BofA Global Research expects gen AI to catalyze an evolution in corporate efficiency and productivity that may transform the global economy, as well as our lives,” says Vanessa Cook, content strategist for Bank of America Institute.”

  • ““The fields of customer service, marketing, and customer development are going to see massive adoption,” he says. “In these uses case, we have enough reference implementations to point to and say, ‘There’s value to be had here.'” He expects the same to happen in all areas of software development, starting with user requirements research through project management and all the way to testing and quality assurance. “We’ve seen so many reference implementations, and we’ve done so many reference implementations, that we’re going to see massive adoption.””

• Reflections (Sam Altman, January 5, 2025, h/t to The Rundown AI, https://www.therundown.ai)

  • “There is no way to train people for this except by doing it, and when the technology category is completely new, there is no one at all who can tell you exactly how it should be done.”

  • “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.”

  • “We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”

• EURASIA GROUP'S TOP RISKS FOR 2025 (Eurasia Group, January 6, 2025, h/t to Pablo Biggs, AAIA North Carolina Chapter President)

  • Risk 8: AI unbound: “AI's power and capabilities will continue to grow in 2025, with new models able to act autonomously, create self-replicas, and further blur human-machine boundaries. But as most governments opt for lighter-touch regulation and international cooperation falters, the risks and collateral damage from unbound AI will multiply.”

  • Registration required to access (free) report

• AI ready to hit its stride in schools in 2025 (TheHill.com, December 31, 2024)

  • “Experts predict that 2025 will be the year artificial intelligence (AI) truly gets off the ground in K-12 schools. 2024 laid the groundwork for AI to reach a level of “maturity” in education, with the federal government releasing guidance on the issue and growing numbers of teachers getting professional training on the technology and classes on data science available to students.”

  • “Earlier this year, the federal government released a 74-page AI toolkit for schools that focused on safeguarding student privacy, creating plans to integrate the technology to fit student needs and how to use it to assist with learning.”

• The gambling industry's sly new way to suck money from desperate Americans (Business Insider/MSN, January 6, 2025)

  • “Jason Feige, a cofounder of nQube, had been working on computational astrophysics when his partner, Stasi Baran, found a scientific paper about the problem of optimal casino floor planning. Though neither had any gaming experience, they both realized their work could be a fit. "I like math and I like hard problems, and she brought me just a monster of a problem and I just fell in love with it," Feige says. "I have never seen data as clean and as comprehensive as what you see in this industry, largely because it is so heavily regulated. But that combined with the kind of powerful AI systems that I've been building, it was just such a natural fit. I just absolutely fell in love with the industry."”

  • “"We have machine-learning models that are understanding and humanizing that player, that player data," says Ian Tibot, Future Anthem's chief commercial officer. "We see every single spin of a slot, we see every single bet, and we actually understand the experience that the player is having by creating the concept of a session out of that data, and that allows us to understand changes in patterns of behavior."”