Greetings everyone, and welcome to the very first edition of the Barefoot Bytes. We intend on sending this out monthly, and providing some excellent content that will cover our analysis/opinions, trends, tips, and news in tech, mostly software and AI. And a human will be writing them. If you don’t want to keep getting these, you can unsubscribe in the footer. But give us a shot – you might like it!
In this edition, we’re going to cover 2024 predictions.
I want to start the year by making some bold predictions for 2024. This way there will be written proof to throw in my face at the end of the year when I get it dead wrong. Or perhaps written proof that I can see the future and am a genius, depending on how things shape up.
OpenAI launched the GPT store this month, so we will start to see highly specialized chat bots and other customized generative models. Every consumer brand will need a GPT app in the same way that they all need a website today. Do I want to go to dominos.com to order my pizza, or would I rather tell ChatGPT “Please have a medium Hawaiian from Domino’s delivered to my house”? LLM-powered chatbots will begin replacing search or websites as the starting point for many digital journeys. How long until we’re seeing ads in ChatGPT?
In order for the Domino’s delivery above to work, I’m going to need a virtual avatar/assistant to help me communicate with these apps and the greater AI in general. It will know my personal preferences, private information like my credit card and home address, and other things to facilitate transactions with these apps. These can be trained with data like my email and SMS history, my interactions online, or phone usage. I’m going to name him Gunther. So really I could just prompt with, “Gunther, order my wife’s favorite pizza for delivery” and he’ll run off to get it done.
Neural Processing Units (NPUs) will become much more commonplace in personal computers. This will allow users to run local inference versus utilizing costly backend cloud servers. This will lead to a major refresh in corporate computer purchases because ultimately it will be seen as a cost saver.
This is not investment advice. Investing in crypto involves the almost assured risk of losing your shirt. With that being said, these things tend to run in 4-year cycles and it’s time for another BTC bull run. I’ve already fired up my algorithmic trading bots. Spot ETF approvals along with a Bitcoin halving in April will make for a wild ride. Alt-coins typically will follow suit. Buckle up!
It’s too late to put the AI genie back in the bottle. With the upcoming 2024 presidential election, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that we will be seeing a massive surge in all sorts of AI-based misinformation, deep fakes, and international influence creating a very dark cloud of confusion and distrust this November.
They’re coming for your data. I expect to see a large uptick in data security breaches in small to medium sized businesses. The reason for this is that machine learning models and the data scientists behind them are hungry for data. Bad actors will use stolen data for inference in models to build nefarious AI. Social engineering will become even more prevalent. Zero Trust authentication will need to proliferate everywhere as a result.
Today, reputable websites will attach a “Sponsored” tag on content that was paid to be placed on a site. It won’t be long until we will start seeing “Generated” tags on content, indicating that they were partly or entirely created by generative AI. Probably will come as a mandate from the FTC.
Brands will leverage LLM’s like GPT or Llama and layer in audience signals with the company’s branding and proprietary content. They can use these custom models to create brand-specific messaging, marketing content, or support bots. Agencies will begin selling this as a service. (Side note: we can build these for you.)
Femtech is an industry that is building products that use technology to address women’s health issues. It’s at a tipping point and we’re going to see a massive surge of investment in 2024. Don’t believe me? Ask Werner Vogel (Amazon CTO), “Women’s healthcare reaches an inflection point as FemTech investment surges, care goes hybrid, and an abundance of data unlocks improved diagnoses and patient outcomes. The rise of FemTech will not only benefit women, but lift the entire healthcare system.”
If you use a mac you may be seeing random animations in your video chats, like fireworks when you do two thumbs up. It’s been happening to our COO Peter and it cracks me up every time, because Apple never told anyone. Anyways, if you want to turn it off, read this.
Adobe’s 20B acquisition of Figma fell through. This bodes well for Figma remaining a leading tool for UX design, and saves it from a future overlord that brought us the likes of Flash and PDFs.
Fusion Ignition. This is old but a lot of people missed it. It’s a big deal and might be what saves the planet. If your kids are still wondering what they want to be when they grow up, I would suggest scientist, either data or nuclear, take your pick.
Well that ought to do it for the first edition. Stay tuned next month as our COO Peter Holmes covers 2024 UX Design trends.
Hunter Jensen, Barefoot Solutions CEO
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San Diego, CA 92117