AI Pause, Shifts in Social, Big Tech, Apple's Bad Year: 2024 Predictions

John Battelle

Published Dec 28, 2023

Let's talk 2024.

2023 was a down year on the predictions front, but at least I've learned to sidestep distractions like Trump, crypto, and Musk. If I can avoid talking about the joys of the upcoming election and/or the politics of Silicon Valley billionaires, I'm optimistic I'll return to form. As always, I am going to write this post with no prep and in one stream-of-conscious sitting. Let's get to it.

The AI party takes a pause. The technology industry - and by this point, the entire capitalist experiment - is addicted to boom and bust cycles and riddled with blinkered optimism. In 2023 we allowed ourselves to dream of AI genies; we imagined trillions in future economic gains, we invested as if those gains were a certainty. In 2024, we'll wake up and realize - as we did with the web in the early 2000s - that there's a lot of hard work to do before our dreams become a reality. I'm not predicting an AI crash - but rather a period of digestion, with a possible side of Tums. Corporations will find their initial pilots less impactful than they hoped, and when told of the sums they must spend to course correct, insist on cutting back. Consumers will become accustomed to genAI's outputs and begin to rethink their $20 a month subscriptions. Growth will slow, though it will not stagnate. Regulators around the world will take the year to move past Terminator nightmares and into the hard work of deeply understanding AI's societal impact. IP holders - artists, newspapers, craftspeople - will press their lawsuits and infuse the market with uncertainty and hesitancy. In short, society will take a pause that refreshes. And that will be a good thing.
But Progress Continues... It may feel like a pause, but below the tech media scorekeeping narrative, a growing ecosystem of AI startups will make important strides in areas that will matter beyond 2024. AI is driven by data, and as a society we're not particularly good at structuring, governing, or sharing data. It makes sense that big companies with access to unholy amounts of structured data pioneered the AI era. (Of course, if you're not a big company, and you want access to massive amounts of data, it helps to just take it without asking permission). But the AI-driven startups that will make waves in 2024 will do so by structuring discrete chunks of valuable information on behalf of very specific customers. It won't make many headlines, but taken collectively, it's this kind of work that will lay the groundwork for AI becoming truly magical.
Big Tech's Mid-life Crisis. Perhaps I could call this "Big Tech's mid-mid-life crisis," because it's been building for a few years now. It started with the techlash after Cambridge Analytica in 2018, got a temporary reprieve with the pandemic, but is back with a vengeance thanks to the law of large numbers. Every year it gets more difficult for the Amazons, Google, and Apples of the world to continue their ever-upward march. As the chart at left demonstrates, 2023 was a very good year for shareholders of big tech companies. And more likely than not, that will continue for 2024. But stress fractures are inevitable as market forces shift. Doctorow's "enshittification" thesis will continue to play out. Consumers will grow ever more weary of hidden fees, creeping advertising, attention steering, and countless other ways the BigCos milk their competitive advantages so as to prop up investors' profit expectations. Regulators, never first to any party, will continue to press their countless cases - scoring several big wins, particularly in the EU. But perhaps the most tectonic of shifts to emerge in 2024 will be in the very model that underpins Big Tech's grip on consumers: Control of our data. Which brings us to...
Fediverse Rising. Why must we give shitty names to every good thing that happens on the Internet? The "fediverse" is, according to Wikipedia, "...a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe"... is an ensemble of social networks which can communicate with each other, while remaining independent platforms. Users on different social networks and websites can send and receive updates from others across the network." That doesn't quite do the concept justice, but it's a start. What really matters here isn't whether your post (and your social network) on Threads can effortlessly travel to Wordpress or Flipboard or, eventually, Instagram or TikTok. What truly matters here is how consumer expectations will shift toward a model where each of us is feels in control of our core public personae independent of any tech platform. And that shift has the potential to change not just our expectations of the content we share and consume, but our understandings of what constitutes an honest and fair value exchange with Big Tech. It's strange to acknowledge that a huge driver of this shift will be Meta, which has already begun "federating" its Threads service. But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth (and remember, it's never a good idea to stand behind it, either.) Related: A bevy of fun social sites will pop up that become wildly popular, then disappear after a few months.
Apple Gets Bitten. Apple has a big year ahead. Its Vision Pro device is rumored to launch early this year, though it may prove more Newton than iPhone in its initial impact. Meanwhile, most of the tech world has woken up to a drum I've been banging for years: Despite posturing as anti-advertising and pro-privacy, Apple is a very large advertising company. If it wants to maintain its growth (and its margins) in 2024, Apple will have to grow that advertising business significantly. Advertising will no longer be a sideshow to its sexier device business; it will be a $10-15 billion juggernaut with 50-90-percent profit margins. That means all the negative energy, regulatory scrutiny, and consumer ick once reserved for Facebook and Google will turn its gaze westward to Cupertino. Add to that Apple's multi-year lag in developing consumer AI tools, and, well, Apple's going to have a forgettable year, even if it does manage to keep its stock propped up (like all of Big Tech, it most likely will manage to do that).
Bright Spots Emerge in Media. Wait, what?! The eternal media pessimist has something positive to say about his chosen field? Yes - but I'm not predicting a wholesale resurgence in media. Instead, I think the environment is ripe for smaller, high-quality publications to emerge. AI-driven made-for-advertising content will likely drive a stake into the already attenuated heart of "at-scale" publishers like G/O, Buzzfeed and Vice, and as high-quality voices begin to realize they've traded one corrupt platform for another (say, Buzzfeed for Substack), they'll continue an emerging trend of banding together and creating professional outlets that can build true relationships with their audience. I'm not predicting the rise of a new magazine era here, but I do think the world is thirsty for trustworthy voices that go beyond a single influencer adept at riding the algorithmic waves of TikTok, YouTube, or Substack.
Cars Will Keep Their Drivers. Any of you have a friend who came back from San Francisco raving about how they took a Waymo or Cruise taxi, and it had to be the future of transportation? I'm here to tell you it's not. Even if driverless tech was ready for prime time, municipalities - whose approvals matter more than state and federal governments - are decidedly not. Driverless cars raise far larger issues than most city governments are capable of addressing - including tough questions of morality, employment, class, liability, and politics, to name a few juicy ones. If you want to experience the future of transportation, I suggest you look into an e-bike.
Enterprise Data Moves Beyond Marketing. For as long as "big data" has been a thing, its main purpose in large companies has been to inform marketing campaigns. That's because money follows utility, and over the past two decades we've built a massive ecosystem of data-driven marketing platforms (Google and Meta, of course, but also Amazon, Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, LiveRamp, etc). For nearly as long we've also heard promises that all that consumer data might be useful for more than just selling stuff. Why can't the data from retail media networks inform supply chains, for example? Or why can't customer marketing segments inform that same customer's experience across all touch points? Anyone who's worked on these problems knows they're maddeningly difficult - in the main because of institutional and cultural barriers inside corporations. But this coming year we'll see at least a few touchstone examples of data-driven applications from enterprise players that change the way B2B leaders consider justifying their investments in IT. And for once, it won't be to make a marketing campaign more efficient.
The New York Times Loses Its Suit Against AI. News of this lawsuit hit as I was writing this post, and I'll admit I've not yet read the complaint. However, I do know that if this suit gets to trial, the Times will be no match for the collective power of the conservative technology and political movements backing Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and their ilk. Regardless, the case will be a fascinating window into one of the most compelling power struggles of our era - between institutions once entrusted with gatekeeping Truth, and those seeking to bend it toward larger, if not entirely noble pursuits. Worth watching, even if the outcome feels pre-ordained.

I'm going to call it at nine this year. I've been writing for nearly four hours, and I've always stopped myself from overthinking this post. Here's to all of you - thanks for reading this far, and let me know your thoughts. I'm @johnbattelle on Threads, jbat at battellemedia.com on email, or leave a comment here. Happy 2024!