philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

[Shelly Palmer] Things That Have My Attention For 2025

This is the time of year I try to gather my observations and write them down. Most years, I craft a trend report or enumerate my “investable theses,” but this year, I simply want to share what’s on my mind. These are not predictions or forecasts—just a collection of the ideas and concepts that have captured my attention. From the accelerating pace of innovation to the profound societal shifts driven by AI, here’s what I’m thinking about as 2024 comes to a close:

The Great AI Transformation of 2025

The great AI transformation of 2025 won’t be about technology—it will be about leadership. Technology evolves exponentially, as it always has, but tech alone is not the answer. When you teach someone to complete three hours of work in three minutes, they won’t automatically move to the next task unless they are motivated and properly compensated. This is a leadership challenge, not a technological one. Success in 2025 will belong to those who understand how to lead teams in this era of unprecedented productivity.

Keeping Up to Date

The pace of technological change has reached an almost incomprehensible velocity. For over 25 years, I’ve been preaching exponential change, yet I, (like just about everyone) find myself struggling to keep up. Staying informed has gone from a strategic imperative to an ongoing battle against the overwhelming flood of information. AI-powered curation tools are no longer luxuries; they are necessities.

Humans Are No Longer the Sole Writers of History

AI has become a full co-writer of human history. Generative AI systems now shape culture, create narratives, and influence decisions at a scale we’ve never seen before. This evolution raises profound questions about authorship and authenticity.

AGI: The New North Star

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has supplanted AI as the ultimate goal for big model builders. The term “AI” feels almost quaint as tech giants race to define what a true AGI can achieve.

Reasoning Engines

Reasoning engines represent the next frontier in AI development. Unlike traditional LLMs, they aim to provide structured, logical decision-making. Their potential applications, from strategic planning to complex problem-solving, are boundless.

Agentic Systems

Everyone I know is working on agentic systems—software capable of autonomous action. Their development will redefine how we think about tools, assistants, and personal AI collaborators.

Marketing to Bots

As agentic systems become ubiquitous, marketing must adapt. Each of us will probably have multiple AI personas making decisions on our behalf. Brands will have to learn to target bots, not just humans, with personalized, bot-friendly messaging.

The Loneliness Epidemic: Synthetic Companionship

Platforms like character.ai are captivating audiences of all ages (but especially Gen-Alpha and Gen-Z). Synthetic companions are replacing traditional human interaction. Is this a passing fad, or are we witnessing the rise of a new social dynamic? Also, from a brand POV, are we authentically synthetic or synthetically authentic? It’s a new world.

The End of Link-Based Search

AI-driven summaries are putting a lot of stress on traditional, link-based search models. This shift poses existential questions for search engines, publishers, and the broader information ecosystem. 

Talking to Data

Apps like Google’s NotebookLM and Meta’s NotebookLlama enable users to converse with their data, offering unprecedented insights and interactions. This transformative approach to information management is reshaping everything from education to enterprise decision-making.

Productivity & Workflow Innovation

Simply increasing productivity with an AI stack isn’t enough. To unlock AI’s full potential, businesses must innovate workflows and processes at the same pace and with the same intensity as the technology is evolving.

Human-AI Co-Worker Teams

The future of work demands new rules for human-AI collaboration. Teams must redefine roles and expectations to fully integrate AI systems as partners, not tools.

Creativity vs. Execution

Humans excel at creativity; AI thrives in execution. Understanding this distinction is essential to assigning work effectively in hybrid human-AI teams. Here’s what I mean.

Multimodal Capabilities

The rise of multimodal AI systems is empowering a new era of “social production,” where anyone can describe and produce complex outputs. This democratization of production capability is magical—and disruptive (just don’t confuse it with creativity).

Creating a Culture of Continuous Adaptation

The days of “change management” and “digital transformation” are over. Organizations must now build cultures that embrace perpetual change, fostering resilience and adaptability at every level. We have a nice approach to this.

How LLMs Work

A fundamental understanding of LLM technology—pre-training, inference workloads, and post-training—is essential. Mastering these concepts will separate leaders from laggards in 2025. We have a course that can help.

AI’s Impact on Education

AI has already reshaped teaching and learning at every level of education. The question for 2025 is: what’s next? From personalized tutoring to automated curriculum design, the possibilities are endless.

AI Training Ethics

The ethical implications of AI training are becoming impossible to ignore. From copyright law to biases baked into datasets, ensuring alignment between AI systems and societal values is essential for ethical deployment.

AI Energy Consumption

The environmental impact of AI cannot be overstated. Training large AI models requires vast amounts of energy, prompting the need for more efficient algorithms and sustainable infrastructure to minimize carbon footprints.

...

See the full story here; https://shellypalmer.com/2024/12/things-that-have-my-attention-for-2025/

[Shelly Palmer] The Top 10 Stories of 2024

1. How Much Longer Can The Agency/Client Model Survive?

2. Things That Have My Attention For 2025

4. Mastering the Art of Prompt Engineering (aka Prompt Crafting) Updated

5. RAG: What Every Brand Marketer Needs to Know

9. The AI-Native Flywheel: A Framework for Continuous Adaptation

10. ChatGPT Canvas, Claude Artifacts, and Google NotebookLM: Which AI Productivity Tool Suits Your Needs?

See the full story at https://shellypalmer.com/2024/12/the-top-10-stories-of-2024/?mc_cid=16d5fe7e6c&mc_eid=3ce5196977

10 AI Predictions For 2025

3. Donald Trump and Elon Musk will have a messy falling-out. This will have meaningful consequences for the world of AI.

5. Multiple serious efforts to put AI data centers in space will take shape.

10. The first real AI safety incident will occur.

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2024/12/22/10-ai-predictions-for-2025/

OpenAI’s o3 model aced a test of AI reasoning – but it’s still not AGI

...

However, Chollet described how we might know when human-level intelligence has been demonstrated by some form of AGI. “You’ll know AGI is here when the exercise of creating tasks that are easy for regular humans but hard for AI becomes simply impossible,” he said in the blog post.

Thomas Dietterich at Oregon State University suggests another way to recognise AGI. “Those architectures claim to include all of the functional components required for human cognition,” he says. “By this measure, the commercial AI systems are missing episodic memory, planning, logical reasoning and, most importantly, meta-cognition.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2462000-openais-o3-model-aced-a-test-of-ai-reasoning-but-its-still-not-agi/

Artificial Intelligence in 2030

...

Some industry leaders, including Alexander Karp, the chief executive of Palantir Technologies, have argued that the U.S. needs a program to accelerate development of A.I. technology, similar to how it established the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons, to keep it from falling behind the rest of the world. At the DealBook Summit, Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, the robotics company, disagreed. “It seems to me we have about three or four or five of them already if you look at the big companies who are investing 10s or 20s or 30s of billions of dollars in it,” he said, referring to the handful of companies building generative A.I. models, which includes Meta, Google and OpenAI, which is spending more than $5.4 billion a year to develop A.I.

Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika, an A.I. companion company, said that if the U.S. government wanted to accelerate A.I. research, it should start by making it easier for A.I. scientists to immigrate. ...

In another live poll, six of the 10 panelists indicated they believed A.I. will create more jobs than it destroys. ... But the vision of widespread economic prosperity that some think A.I. puts within reach isn’t a given.  ...

President Trump, in his previous term, tried to push the limits in a bunch of different ways, tried to tell people underneath him to do things that were norm violating or illegal, and they pushed back. If all those people under him were instead 10 times as brilliant, but perfectly loyal — programmed to be perfectly loyal — that could be a destabilizing situation. ...

One immediate fear cited by Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning researcher, is that A.I. will flood the internet with so much false content that most people will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” ... “A.I. slop” could increase the value of things that are created by humans.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/business/dealbook/artificial-intelligence-in-2030.html

Need a research hypothesis? Ask AI.

... MIT researchers have created a way to autonomously generate and evaluate promising research hypotheses across fields, through human-AI collaboration. In a new paper, they describe how they used this framework to create evidence-driven hypotheses that align with unmet research needs in the field of biologically inspired materials. ...

“There’s a lot of stuff you can do without having to go to the lab,” Buehler says. “You want to basically go to the lab at the very end of the process. The lab is expensive and takes a long time, so you want a system that can drill very deep into the best ideas, formulating the best hypotheses and accurately predicting emergent behaviors. Our vision is to make this easy to use, so you can use an app to bring in other ideas or drag in datasets to really challenge the model to make new discoveries.”

See the full story here: https://news.mit.edu/2024/need-research-hypothesis-ask-ai-1219

Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental

...

Reasoning models, like Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, approach problem-solving differently than traditional large language models (LLMs). Given a prompt, these models pause to consider related questions and explain their reasoning before summarizing what they believe to be the most accurate response. Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist for Google DeepMind, noted that this model was “trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning,” and said the company sees promising results when increasing inference time computation—essentially giving the model more time and resources to process queries.

The trade-off? Time. Unlike conventional LLMs, reasoning models often take significantly longer to respond—sometimes seconds or even minutes. ...

From Shelly Palmer daily newsletter

This is where the data to build AI comes from

They audited nearly 4,000 public data sets spanning over 600 languages, 67 countries, and three decades. The data came from 800 unique sources and nearly 700 organizations. ...

Today, most AI data sets are built by indiscriminately hoovering material from the internet. Since 2018, the web has been the dominant source for data sets used in all media, such as audio, images, and video, and a gap between scraped data and more curated data sets has emerged and widened. ...

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/18/1108796/this-is-where-the-data-to-build-ai-comes-from/

Orion glasses: Meta’s bold leap into augmented reality’s future

...

Meta, the owner of Facebook, has introduced its new invention – Orion Glasses. This augmented reality prototype aims to revolutionize the way we use AR technology. ...

Meta emphasizes gesture control, voice commands, and neural wrist interfaces to ensure maximum user comfort. ...

See the full story here: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/lifestyle/shopping/orion-glasses-metas-bold-leap-into-augmented-realitys-future/ar-AA1rgxSE?apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1

AI ENTERTAINMENT STUDIOS: HOW GEN AI TOOLSETS ARE TRANSFORMING PRODUCTION WORKFLOWS

• AI studios use off-the-shelf tools but are also developing in-house workflow solutions to streamline production
• Studios are pursuing “hybrid” production paths that still purposefully incorporate human artists and their creative work 
• Still, they expect using generative AI in a workflow to diminish traditional previsualization and post-production stages

See the full story here; https://variety.com/vip/ai-entertainment-studios-how-gen-ai-toolsets-transforming-production-workflows-1236252190/