What's in Tech : 2024 Recap & AI Special Ed.
Dr.Dinesh Chandrasekar (DC)
Chief Strategy Officer & Country Head, India, Centific AI | Nasscom Deep Tech ,Telangana AI Mission & HYSEA - Mentor & Advisor | Alumni of Hitachi, GE & Citigroup | DeepTech evangelist |Author & Investor| Be Passionate
A Year in Review
For 2024’s last issue of the “What’s in Tech” newsletter, we will be exploring the top news of the year gone by.
Technology took bold strides forward, marked by the mainstream emergence of Agentic AI—the next evolution of Generative AI. Major tech companies introduced early versions of autonomous AI agents, with Salesforce making significant investments to lead this new frontier. NVIDIA solidified its position as a cornerstone of AI innovation, enabling breakthroughs across industries and earning its place as the year’s standout performer. Meanwhile, strategic investments from Databricks, Amazon, OpenAI, and Microsoft accelerated advancements in AI infrastructure and capabilities. Collaborative partnerships involving Oracle, AWS, IBM, Anthropic, and Microsoft underscored the industry's collective push for innovation. Additionally, quantum computing moved closer to practical realization, signaling a future rich with potential to revolutionize computing power and problem-solving. Centific made significant progress in our Frontier AI journey to become the most lovable & responsible AI company delivering great projects to our customers -Creators and Consumers of AI.
Together, these developments have redefined what’s possible, setting the stage for an exciting 2025.
?
Agentic AI goes mainstream
The next evolutionary step of GenAI, most large tech companies have started releasing early versions of their AI agents. Few companies such as Salesforce have bet big on agents by investing significantly in the technology.
The Gemini-powered agent takes control of your Chrome browser, moves the cursor on your screen, clicks buttons, and fills out forms, allowing it to use and navigate websites much like a human would.
The model can natively generate images and audio in addition to text. Gemini 2.0 can also use third-party apps and services, allowing it to tap into Google Search, execute code, and more.
The “Multi-Agent Orchestrator” framework is designed to address key challenges in multi-agent systems, and facilitate complex conversations by intelligently routing queries to the most suitable agent while preserving context.
The company is giving customers the ability to build their own AI agents as well as releasing 10 off-the-shelf bots that can carry out a range of roles including supply chain management, customer service, handling client queries and identifying sales leads.
Swarm provides developers with a blueprint for creating interconnected AI networks capable of communicating, collaborating, and tackling complex tasks autonomously.
The new offerings include healthcare AI models and agents that enable healthcare organizations to integrate and analyze diverse data types, including medical imaging, genomics and clinical records.
The CRM giant’s new low-code suite enables enterprises to build AI agents that can reason for themselves when completing sales, service, marketing, and commerce tasks.
The agents will execute frequent, repetitive tasks and allow employees and managers to focus their time on more strategic tasks and initiatives, enabling higher of productivity across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and services.
The new model named Metis will boast 'retrieval-augmented generation' – the ability to retrieve information from beyond the original data that it's been trained with.
?
NVIDIA, NVIDIA, NVIDIA…
The company has found itself in the right place at the right time, has been the star of the AI show so far.
The model with 1.5 Bn parameters aimed to address the efficiency and performance challenges faced by smaller NLP models while being trained on 1.5 Tn tokens, has outperformed Llama 3.2 and SmolLM v2.
Announced advancements in Generative Physical AI, including the NVIDIA Metropolis reference workflow for building interactive visual AI agents and NVIDIA NIM microservices that will help developers train physical machines and improve how they handle complex tasks.
The datasets enable the training of reward models that can effectively align LLMs like Llama 3 70B to match or exceed the performance of models such as Llama 3 70B Instruct and GPT-4 on major alignment metrics.
Accenture and NVIDIA announced an expanded partnership, which includes Accenture’s formation of a new NVIDIA Business Group to help the world’s enterprises rapidly scale their AI adoption. The NVIDIA Business Group launched with 30,000 professionals receiving training globally to help clients reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption with AI agents.
Google Cloud announced plans to establish a startup hub and CoE in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India. NVIDIA suggested creating a blueprint to transform the state into the “Intelligence Capital of India”.
This collaboration aims to deliver optimized predictive and generative AI workflows by bringing together the NVIDIA AI platform and Salesforce’s Agentforce agents to improve productivity across the sales, service, marketing, and IT teams.
It will enable clients to build custom LLMs with domain-specific knowledge and deploy AI systems that reflect their unique business needs and help drive reinvention of their business, and their industry.
?
Key tech investments
Investors include Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, GIC, Iconiq Growth, Insight Partners, MGX, Sands Capital, WCM Investment Management and Wellington Management.
Anthropic has named AWS its primary training partner, in addition to continuing to be its primary cloud provider, and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has raised US$6.6 bn in its latest funding round, as investors including its early backer Microsoft continue to bet big on artificial intelligence (AI).
The Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Investment Partnership includes other companies like Global Infrastructure Partners, an infrastructure investor, and MGX, a tech investor in the UAE.
领英推荐
The company is planning to significantly expand its technical teams to build the next generations of accurate, data privacy-focused enterprise AI.
The company announced its plans to invest €7.8 billion in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Germany through 2040, and is expected to launch its first AWS Region in Germany by the end of 2025.
Microsoft has announced US$4.3 Bn in investment for developing data centers and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) hub in France.
Microsoft announced plans to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Japan. MS plans to build and upgrade data centers, conduct AI training programs to upskill local talent.
The investment will go into the construction and buildup of data center capabilities, all associating with the Asia-Pacific Singapore region.
?
Biggest partnerships of the year
The partnership allows Meta to use Oracle’s AI Cloud Infrastructure – and collaborate with Oracle on the development of AI Agents based on Meta’s Llama models.
The partnership will focus on building a series of AI solutions using Amazon’s Bedrock service and foundational models for a number of industries, including financial services and pharmaceuticals. PwC is also set to integrate Amazon Bedrock Automated Reasoning LLM accuracy validation tools within existing customer solutions to strengthen validation processes and governance.
During AWS re:Invent, IBM and AWS will unveil new developments to help businesses adopt responsible AI and harness generative AI with an emphasis on transparency, security and trust.
The partnership facilitates the responsible application of AI, enabling the use of Claude within Palantir’s products to support government operations such as processing vast amounts of complex data rapidly, elevating data driven insights, identifying patterns and trends more effectively.
Snapchat will leverage Google Vertex AI’s multimodal capabilities to offer more engaging and innovative features for the Snapchat community through its AI assistant ‘My AI’.
The Oracle Database @ AWS will provide customers with a unified experience between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and AWS, offering simplified database administration, billing, and unified customer support.
This tech suite will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s LLMs via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments.
AWS customers will leverage the?Scale GenAI Platform?on the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center or the AWS Marketplace to evaluate their GenAI apps to customize, configure, and fine-tune the underlying models all on top of Amazon Bedrock.
The agreement will reportedly give the ChatGPT-maker access to potentially millions of Apple users, as the chatbot’s capabilities get paired with Apple’s applications and services.
Through this deal, Reddit gets access to OpenAI’s tech for building AI features, and OpenAI gets real-time access to Reddit posts that feed into ChatGPT.
?
Quantum computing closer to becoming a reality
Willow can reduce errors exponentially when scaling with more qubits, thus overcoming a central challenge in quantum error correction that has been worked on for almost 30 years.
Microsoft says it will start delivering the computers’ quantum capabilities to customers by the end of 2025, with availability via the Azure cloud service as well as through on-premises hardware.
Centific's 2024 AI Highlights
Centific has actively engaged in strategic partnerships and showcased its platforms and products at various events throughout 2024. Here are some key collaborations and events:
Strategic Partnerships in 2024
Events Showcasing Platforms and Products
These partnerships and events highlight Centific's commitment to advancing AI technologies and fostering innovation through strategic collaborations and impactful showcases.
Farewell to 2024
?As we bid farewell to 2024, it’s clear that this year has been pivotal in redefining the technology landscape. From the mainstream adoption of Agentic AI to the transformative advancements in AI infrastructure, strategic collaborations, and quantum computing, the pace of innovation has never been more exhilarating. The convergence of AI capabilities, infrastructure expansion, and strategic investments has not only pushed the boundaries of what’s possible but also laid the groundwork for a new era of technological revolution. This year showcased the power of partnerships, the significance of sustainability in AI development, and the immense potential of next-gen computing, leaving an indelible mark on industries worldwide.
Looking Ahead to 2025
The coming year promises to be a transformative chapter as these advancements gain maturity. We can expect Agentic AI to evolve further, integrating seamlessly into business and consumer ecosystems, becoming indispensable digital companions. The momentum in quantum computing is likely to accelerate, with breakthroughs that could redefine data security, logistics, and computational sciences. Meanwhile, sustainability in AI and cloud solutions will take center stage, pushing enterprises to balance innovation with environmental responsibility. With continued strategic investments and collaborations, 2025 will undoubtedly be a year of scaling innovation, democratizing AI, and unlocking unprecedented opportunities for industries globally. Stay tuned for a year brimming with possibilities!
Best Regards
Dinesh Chandrasekar DC
Centific #AI