CES 2024 Preview: Get Ready for a ‘Tsunami’ of AI

CES 2024 Preview: Get Ready for a ‘Tsunami’ of AI

In the event 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 trade’s largest annual gathering within the US, is returning to Las Vegas on January 9. It’s a huge, four-day-long bustling bazaar of tech, with expo halls stuffed 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 vehicles 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 absolutely saturated the tech trade by the point final yr’s CES came about, there wasn’t actually an entire lot of GenAI speak in Las Vegas final January. Consequently, CES 2023 appears to be like virtually primitive in hindsight, arriving a scant six weeks behind the best technological revolution because the cell phone.

That gained’t be the case in 2024. “We didn’t get the total CES fireplace hose of AI bulletins final yr like we’re going to have,” says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Technique. “In the event you thought it was a wave final yr, it may be a tsunami this yr.”

Count on to see AI all over the place at CES: in vehicles, scooters, headphones, cameras, audio system, and televisions. In some circumstances, these merchandise will merely embody one other solution to entry a ChatGPT-style question-and-response service to deal with spoken instructions. However in different circumstances, the advances might really feel extra impactful. Firms like Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD are anticipated to announce chips that help AI providers on the gadgets that carry them. These chips would course of AI duties regionally, with out having to ship a request to a server within the cloud after which await a response, making issues like pc imaginative and prescient, voice-to-text providers, and generative computing really feel snappier.

CES is the place the narrative round trade 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 every thing,” Sag says. “Will probably be so prevalent and so dominant that some individuals will simply be sick of it.”