The Top Generative AI Stories of 2023 and Seven Themes to Follow in 2024

OpenAI, NVIDIA, chatbots, LLMs, and much more

Looking back at Synthedia article statistics for 2023 offers insight into what drove readers’ attention and what they care about. ChatGPT and generative AI bot experiences overall, OpenAI’s broader product portfolio, generative AI economics, LLMs, and Google were the most popular. Here are the top 20 articles articles from 2023:

1. What is Grok? Is X.ai's Chatbot for Twitter Really Better Than ChatGPT?

2. GPT-4 is Better Than GPT-3.5 - Here Are Some Key Differences

3. Timeline of the 106-Hour OpenAI Saga, Altman Will Return, New Board Formed

4. Doesn't OpenAI Board Member Adam D'Angelo Have a Conflict of Interest in Ongoing Dispute?

5. The Imminent Death of ChatGPT [and generative AI] is Greatly Exaggerated - Look at the Data

6. Updated: OpenAI Board Fires Sam Altman as CEO for Not Being "Consistently Candid," but He Might Return

7. 12 Things that Matter from OpenAI Dev Day - Including 2M Developers and Personal Bots

8. ChatGPT's iOS App Just Launched - First-Look Video Demo and Key Highlights

9. A Timeline of Large Language Model Innovation

10. ChatGPT Plus Subscribers Can Now Use Plugins and Web Browsing - Here are Some Tips

11. Anthropic's LLM Claude Now Has a 75K Word Context Window. Consider What That Means.

12. Accenture Had $450M in Gen AI Projects Last Quarter, New Deal with McDonald's, But...

13. 20 Google Bard Announcements. How to Access it Today in 180 [non-EU] Countries.

14. Amazon CEO Lays Out Generative AI Strategy, Says Everyone in the Company is Using the Tech

15. 9 Jaw-Dropping Features Coming to ChatGPT - Video Demo

16. Generative AI to Reach $1.3 Trillion in Annual Revenue - Let's Break That Down

17. "Google Has No Moat" in AI. A Fascinating Memo on the AI Market from Within Google.

18. The EU AI Act is Approved but It's Not Done Yet - A Breakdown of Some Interesting Details

19. Google's Gemini LLM Arrives Next Week and It May Just Outperform GPT-4 (sort of)

20. What is OpenAI's Q*? How Aligned Incentives are Fueling a Questionable Narrative.

Generative AI Topic Popularity

In case you are keeping score, OpenAI was the main topic of eight of the top ten most-read articles and directly related to the other two. Of course, three of those were directly related to the OpenAI management soap opera that played out in November. Still, it was the main topic of 50% of the top 20 (and 50% of the top 30), though the second 10 most popular stories made room for Anthropic, Amazon, and Google. Moves by the tech titans, along with OpenAI and Anthropic (both prominent tech titan proteges), dominated reader interest.

Notably, seven of the top 20 articles focused specifically on LLMs, five on generative AI-powered chat apps, and three on industry economics. Plus, several others touched on each of these topics in some way. As the industry rose quickly in 2023, products, technology, strategy, economics, and intrigue drove reader interest.

This is most accurately portrayed as a reflection of the Synthedia readership interests. However, this also represents an audience disproportionately engaged in the business and technology of generative AI.

Synthedia Says

Beyond the reader's interest, Synthedia analysis shows that three companies drove generative AI in 2023:

1. OpenAI - The first company to translate generative AI technologies into everyday solutions for consumers and enterprises.

2. Microsoft - While Sam Altman was the poster boy for generative AI, Satya Nadella became the touchstone that paved the way for enterprises to trust the technology. His clearly articulated strategy and big commitment of resources to OpenAI and Azure in January set the stage for a very big year, that its rivals were forced to follow. Beyond January, the company’s integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 into Bing, Microsoft 365, and other applications gave the industry a playbook to follow.

3. NVIDIA - One company has captured more generative AI-related revenue than any other. The GPU innovator creates the engines that the most advanced AI models use for training and inference. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are all working on building or acquiring GPU and CPU alternatives for generative AI workloads, but they are also beholden to NVIDIA. This will continue to be true in the first half of 2024 and likely throughout the year.

These are the companies that led the industry in the biggest generative AI segment: LLMs. Everyone else was playing catch-up.

Honorable mentions go to Anthropic and Google in the proprietary LLM segment and Meta, Mistral, Databricks, and Hugging Face in the open-source segment. Behind the scenes in the tooling and evaluation categories, Weights & Biases, LangChain, and MLCommons showed notable leadership.

7 Topics to Look for in 2024

While history may not always prove a good proxy of future interest, I suspect the crowds expressed some wisdom over the past year. Here are the top themes we expect to write about in 2024.

1. Gen AI Assistants - ChatGPT, Grok, Copilot, and Bard are all relevant because they are so useful. Standalone assistants and those embedded in enterprise applications as knowledge bots will be key drivers of generative AI adoption in 2024.

2. LLMs - Text-to-image and text-to-video will show significant advances in 2024, but large language models (LLM) are set to have the most impact. LLMs have the broadest applications and offer the most significant benefits. They also draw the most interest from enterprises and Synthedia readers. While 2023 was a year of LLM announcements, 2024 will be a year of evaluation, validation, differentiation, and value. It will also be a year when several large companies acquire LLM startups.

3. Economics - Money is an indication of interest, momentum, and trends. The primary generative AI economic indicators of 2023 were related to giant funding rounds and optimistic revenue forecasts. This year will feature more revenue and more large-scale investment. You should expect to hear about enterprises investing hundreds of millions of dollars in generative AI for internal uses of the technology. This will complement the investment by the technology companies looking to profit from the sale of generative AI technology and solutions.

4. Competition - Everybody loves a horse race. The companies competing for the top positions in the generative AI industry and their strategies will continue to drive interest. It is important information because we all need signals to help us assess what companies and products are likely to succeed. This allows us to prioritize our attention and efforts.

5. Open-Source - 2023 was dominated by the proprietary LLMs. Despite a lot of attention paid to Meta’s Llama models and other options, there were not a lot of signs of enterprise adoption this past year. A few companies were adventurous and had the requisite skills to give it a go, but there was more talk and experimentation than adoption. This will be a significant area of growth in 2024.

6. Tooling - LLMs and chatbots might be in the spotlight, but you need tools to make them work in production. This will be an important area of focus in 2024.

7. Governance - The internal rules for operating generative AI solutions and regulations were mostly an afterthought this past year. They will become high-priority topics in 2024.

What do you think? What were the top stories of 2023, and what are your expectations for 2024? Let me know in the comments, and if we get a few contributions, we will publish reader predictions and comments in an upcoming Synthedia post.

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