Frontier technology for 2024: as AI accelerates convergence, the future will exceed our expectations.

I have normally considered AI as an "accelerator" rather than an "enabler" technology in my classification of these two major groups. However, the last few weeks have helped me to rethink this considering some of the uses to which it is being put.

I think it is the first technology I have to classify as an enabler-accelerator because of the impact it is having. Going through the nearly 22 key technologies for this decade, there is not one that is unaffected. Including AI itself. Not only that: after exploring with its authors some of the most disruptive and transformative projects cooking (from cyber defense to biomedicine, autonomous robots, nanotechnology, liquid finance and invisible payments to agent macro-networks, recreational and industrial metaverses), the advance in AI has advanced the underlying technologies and the concept of what was possible and what was not, between 3-9 years.

Transparent payments are going to be vital for models where autonomous and intelligent agents are going to start appearing. In fact, machines, systems, are going to be the new customers and we will have to be able to give them mechanisms so that they can interact as never before with intelligent systems. Agents will talk to agents and that's a matter of time. APIs are the glue of the Internet, but now AIs are the mechanisms for this glue to make sense and for systems to interact and share knowledge. The network of networks is going to be more networked than ever.

That is why graphs are going to experience a resurgence and an evolution towards hypergraph models, which are key in the training and use of large-scale LLMs, where we will increasingly see the use of specific, corporate, niche and tailored models. Multimodal models will be much more frequent and the open source ecosystem will have a lot to say. There will be changes of players: many startups at the top will be frozen and other players will appear that will surprise us and that are now off the radar.

A very clear example is in the field of simulations, which applies from logistics to portfolio management in the stock market through persistent virtual environments and where we are seeing that projections parked a couple of years ago because of their unfeasibility, are now receiving investment and enthusiasm from engineers and investors. A mainstream example: Meta's metaverse is now 2 years closer and for example, we are going to see very useful leaps in the use of logical qbits.

In quantum computing systems it is not only feasible but also industrializable at scale. Also in decentralized technologies we are going to see consolidations of models that really make sense, after the turbulent years we have lived through as a consequence of the crypto chaos. We will return to the origins, with maturity and real use cases. Taking back the blockchain as infrastructure to support functions related to tangible systems and also, for the first time solving real problems that the blockchain had pending and remained hidden under the carpet. I think it's even possible that we will see a resurgence of NFTs, perhaps as part of that identity and watermarking technology that will appear as a derivative of generative AI: more than anything else, we're going to have to generate trust over digital content.

The big challenges for 2024 are related to the need for more and better hardware, to the growing energy consumption required, and the impact on the economy and real society. Not to forget cybersecurity and the change in the geopolitical game derived from technology and especially AI at scale. autonomous agents, communications, and hyper-predictive systems, plus the possibilities in social engineering through the internet are the challenges. And the ownership of data and the transparency of algorithms will continue to focus the debate around AI and technology: responsible AI goes far beyond what we are used to dealing with and we sometimes forget that the impacts of AI are already circulating in the world and mingling with what comes from human creativity.

Trust management is again becoming evident and perhaps here, regardless of blockchain, a lot of work will have to be done on the identity of things. Recovering the IoT paradigm, we need to be able to create human interactions with digital and virtual things, to distinguish the synthetic from the original, to create a value chain that supports trust, but above all, to know if what comes into our hands has been produced with the appropriate standards in each case. And here again, technological convergence has a lot to say: various techniques and tools must be combined to solve the problem well.

As exciting areas for this year, the creation of much smaller AI SLLMs, with Edge computing potential, and physical autonomous agents, the extension of GenAI to more non-English speaking cultures of the world, new efficient systems, first steps of the interverse. advances and democratization of specific hardware for nanoLLLMs in commercial devices and HPC systems, important advances in spaceTech and bioTech and above all in quantum computing at scale, where I foresee important leaps in 3 key lines: effective error management, use of logical qbits (where very important advances have already been made) and new architectures, more flexible and organically scalable as quantum hardware advances. In quantum communications, we are going to have some relevant surprises throughout the year because it was one of those technologies that in 2023 was obscured by the noise derived from the impact of generative AI.

In summary, I believe we have a spectacular 2024 ahead of us where AI-enabled technology waves (in as-a-service models but mostly small ones) and increasing processing power will emerge and converge. However, it will be a year of progress and transition towards 2029-2030, where we may not have reached the Technological Singularity predicted by Kurzweil for 2029, but we will find a scenario much different from the current one, more complex, more challenging and more in line with the idea of the future that we all have, although as always, the future will end up surprising us.

I wish you a happy and exciting year 2024. Let's keep working and let the future and technology surprise us: they certainly will.