Futuristic #34 – Predictions for 2025

In this episode, Steve and Cam provide their top three tech/AI highlights from 2024 and provide their top predictions for 2025.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

FUTURISTIC 34

[00:00:00] SS: Recording in progress. Welcome to the future. I’m Steve Sammartino, and introducing the great OG of podcasting, Mr Cameron Reilly.

[00:00:18] CR: Turning me on, Steve. Slow down. Um, don’t turn me on until later in the show. Welcome to The Futuristic Episode 34. We’re recording this 20th of December, 2024. How are you, my little buddy?

[00:00:31] SS: I’m good. I’m great. It’s big. It’s been a big year, Cameron.

[00:00:38] CR: It has been a big year, Steven. I, I suggested to you last week that we don’t do a show last week, because OpenAI started doing this thing called the 12 Days of OpenAI, where every work day for the last 11 days, uh, they have done a live stream where they’ve launched a new thing, a new feature, a new function of ChatGPT.

[00:01:00] CR: And there’s one more day to go and I said let’s wait till next week because there’s probably something big that’s going to come up and as it turns out like Friday US time, which will be tomorrow our time, they’ll do day 12 and hopefully that’s going to be the biggest thing and we’ve sort of missed the chance to do that but even the last 11 days have been insane like there’s been so much coming out in the last 11 days of the year and while they’re coming out with stuff Google have been coming out with stuff to One up them on their stuff that they’ve come out with, so it’s just been this crazy period of leapfrogging going on in the last couple of weeks.

[00:01:38] CR: But it has been a crazy year, and your idea for the show this year is for us to do like our top things of the year and our predictions for next year, is that what you want to do?

[00:01:47] SS: That’s right. So I was thinking the top three from this year, there’s zillions, but we’re kind of trying to at least squeeze it into an hour or so. And top five each for next year. And interestingly, if I think of some of mine, there’s, there’s a bit of overlap, but I’m going to try and keep them separate. I just did my tech and AI transfer 20, 25 and did 20.

[00:02:08] SS: It could have been a hundred long. Uh, there is some overlap, but that’s what I think we do.

[00:02:15] CR: Okay, well, uh, why don’t you kick it off with your top three things from 2024?

[00:02:22] SS: Okay. So my first one is AI recursion, and it’s not a thing, but I think it’s kind of like a zeitgeist or an event. Never, ever have I seen things get so much better so quickly. Like the iterative. Uh, improvements and features that are coming in. And I think OpenAI has been extraordinary. The amount of new things that they’ve had this year, just from the LLM itself, getting better computation, uh, ability to do maths and not just language stuff, uh, imagery, video, Sora, uh, live video feed on what you’re looking at, web integration, which has been huge as well.

[00:03:11] SS: So. Just the recursion happening so quickly, and it’s even blowing my mind, and we know that change is exponential, but it feels like we’ve finally hit the exponential part of the exponential. If that makes sense, the doubling and the recursion is just quick. Let’s just think about Apple do annual events, and things didn’t change that quick, but in the kind of 24 months they’ve been in the Zeitgeist, it’s, like you say, it’s every other month there’s something, and it’s getting quicker and quicker.

[00:03:40] SS: You just mentioned they’re 12 days of open AI.

[00:03:44] CR: Yeah.

[00:03:44] SS: That has never happened in tech.

[00:03:47] CR: No. Look, it, yeah, um, I think you’re right. Recursion is crazy, and this is the sort of stuff that, uh, Kurzweil has been predicting for decades that when you get to the part of the asymptotic part of the exponential curve, that things just go insane. And it,

[00:04:12] SS: It’s incomprehensible speed and, and the recursion itself. And I imagine that this is part of it is that the tool itself is inventing new parts of the tool. Like it’s, it seems that that’s pretty clear. And I don’t think we’ve really been there yet. I think this is the first time because we’ve got, you know, Code that understands code and can self improve.

[00:04:34] SS: I think we’re actually hitting the technology self improvement element of that exponential. And I think that’s why everything is so radical right now. So for me, that was my number one thing this year that blew my mind. Uh, yeah, iterative pace on steroids. That was my number one. My number two. Alright, keep going.

[00:04:57] CR: well, I was just going to say, it’s not just like software, you know, building software, but the ability for people to Increasingly, just to have an idea and then develop it within a week. You know, I saw one of the, I think it was yesterday’s 12 days of OpenAI thing. They launched 1 800 CHAT GPT, which is

[00:05:21] CR: where you can call,

[00:05:23] SS: don’t know what it is, but I love it already because I just love a retro. I hope they’ve got a truck that drives down highways with that written on the side. I hope that so

[00:05:31] SS: much.

[00:05:31] CR: they had it flashing up on the screen while they were doing the live stream in like this really cheesy late night infomercial font. It was fantastic. If you’re in the U. S., you can call 1 800 CHAT GPT and just talk to the AI and ask it questions. If you’re outside of the U. S., You can use WhatsApp to call it and I’m, they were saying it’s, if, if you’re, if you don’t have internet connectivity, but you need to talk to ChatGPT and you have telephone connectivity, you can do it in the US.

[00:06:02] CR: I’m pretty sure, I don’t know about, I’ve never used WhatsApp that much, but I’m pretty sure you need internet, you need data to use WhatsApp, right?

[00:06:10] CR: You can’t just use it over a telephone signal.

[00:06:13] SS: Yeah, data is what you’re

[00:06:14] SS: watching.

[00:06:15] CR: sort of defeats the purpose. But, but that one of the demos that they did is one of the guys used a rotary phone to call ChatGPT.

[00:06:26] CR: And he said, I don’t think I’ve ever used a rotary phone before in my life. So this is an experience on multiple levels. But I was talking to, you know, I was explaining this to Chrissy later on last night. And I was saying like, you know, try and explain that to somebody 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the idea, we were talking about how we remember when the height of cool was to call the time service on your phone.

[00:06:54] CR: I remember in the early 90s, I would do that just because it was cool. At the tone, the time will be 12. 05. And 15 seconds. Beep. Beep. Beep. And you could call and get your horoscope read out. Now, we go, oh yeah, you can just make a phone call, and it’s for free. You can do it for free. I think they’re allowing like, you don’t even have to have a GPT account or anything like that.

[00:07:23] CR: Like 15 minutes a month or something, free phone calls, you can make to GPT from your number. Um, You make a phone call and have a conversation with an artificial intelligence that lands all good. One of the demos they did is a guy said, um, ChatGPT, my friends and I on a road trip, we’re in the middle of nowhere on this highway in California.

[00:07:44] CR: We see these houses. They’re like weird, round coloured houses. Any idea what they would be? And they go, Oh, that’s the famous Flintstone houses that were built. And they’re a tourist thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So just to be able to call AI wherever you are and ask a

[00:07:59] CR: question.

[00:08:00] SS: AI on traditional networks.

[00:08:05] CR: Yeah,

[00:08:06] SS: So not really using data. So you’re kind of not using data.

[00:08:10] CR: No, you’re using a telephone line to call it and it’s talking to you.

[00:08:13] SS: data, by the way.

[00:08:14] CR: well,

[00:08:15] SS: which I love. That was one of their greatest hacks. These are phone calls, and these are data. It’s like, yeah, they’re all ones and zeros flying through the sky, you liars.

[00:08:21] SS: I just want to point that out. I always knew, and I wasn’t falling for it. It’s.

[00:08:25] CR: Everything is ones and zeros. Um, but the, the, the, the point I was going to make about all of this was they said. That this idea came up in a OpenAI Hackathon and the team developed it in like a week to go live with. And this is getting back to the recursion stuff that you’re talking about. To have the tools available now to go, Oh, I want to build this thing.

[00:08:49] CR: And I’ve talked about this on the show, cause I do this all the time now. Oh, I’ve got this idea for a thing, an app I can build that’ll solve a problem of mine. And an hour later I can have it built. Like that is the, Era we are now entering into where billi