The biggest AI wins and fails of 2024
It was a big year in AI. Some companies struck gold — others struck out spectacularly.
It’s the last week before Christmas, so you know what that means: ‘Tis the season for gimmicky end-of-year newsletters.
We would dishonor our marketing and media forefathers if we did not honor this tradition, so it’s time to hand out some totally made-up (but also totally accurate) awards in honor of the year's biggest AI moments.
From the revolving door of executive talent at OpenAI to whatever that Willy Wonka fiasco was back in February, 2024 was a wild ride. While the greatest minds in tech were busy calculating their p(doom), the rest of us were just trying to figure out WTF was up with our aunt’s Shrimp Jesus posts on Facebook.
Cue the AI-generated Oscars music. It’s time for some awards!
Wins
Best in Show: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, which has become the LLM of choice for a devoted cadre of tech insiders
Best Performance in a Supporting Role: NVIDIA, for making everyone else's AI dreams possible — and single-handedly keeping the stock market booming
Biggest Power Move: Amazon’s surprise Nova/chip/supercomputer release and $8 billion investment in Anthropic in early December, setting it up to be one of AI’s biggest power players in 2025
Essay Most Likely to Be Cited by Tech Bros Who Didn't Actually Read It: Anthropic CEO’s tome on the future of “Powerful AI” (aka AGI). Apparently, we’re all going to live forever!
Most Improved: AI voice tech, which went from “robotic GPS monotone” to "savvy NPR host” in a matter of months
Most Likely to Give Your Favorite Podcaster Existential Dread: NotebookLM
Most Potential: Google Veo 2 — coming soon to a news feed near you
Most Likely to Make Google Sweat: GPT Search, which had the incumbent search kingpin panic-launching features faster than you can say, "I'm feeling lucky"
Fact-Checker’s Choice: Gemini 2.0, which was recently dubbed the LLM “least likely to hallucinate” with a (still disconcerting) 83.6% accuracy rate
Best Corporate Plot Twist: OpenAI's pivot to for-profit status
Most Underrated Trend: The rise of open-source LLMs
Fails
Biggest AI Fail: OpenAI’s Whisper, a supposedly groundbreaking healthcare assistant turned into a truly dystopian misfire
Worst Overall Year: Intel watched the AI party from the sidelines (and ultimately gave its CEO the boot) while NVIDIA took home all the chips
Most Eyeroll-Inducing: AI wearables, period.
Most Obnoxious: The widespread — and seemingly unstoppable — rise of AI slop
Most Chaotic: OpenAI's executive team musical chairs, which gave tech journalists more plot twists than Succession
Biggest Troll: Grok-2, which made edgelords everywhere feel validated in the worst way
Most Viral Moment: The hilariously pathetic “Willy Wonka experience,” which turned pure imagination into pure nightmare fuel for some unlucky kids in Glasgow
Weirdest Viral Moment: The inexplicable rise of Shrimp Jesus on social media
Most Likely to Get Sued Into Oblivion: Perplexity, which is already juggling a slew of lawsuits from pissed-off media companies after it supposedly disregarded LLM crawling blockers
Most Underwhelming Launch: Apple Intelligence, which showed up to the AI party like it was fashionably late — but it was actually just late-late
Most Anxiety-Inducing AI Update for Marketers: Google’s AI Overviews
Most Anxiety-Inducing AI Update for Everyone: Google’s AI Overviews telling users to “eat rocks” and add glue to pizza
Honorable Mentions
Tone Deaf Ads of the Year: This one’s a toss-up between Google’s “Dear Sydney” commercial and Apple’s cringeworthy iPad Pro ad, which didn’t exactly crush it with creative audiences. But participation trophies also go to Fiverr, Toys “R” Us, and Coca-Cola for their weird, fever-dream-inducing AI-generated ads, which made us nostalgic for regular old bad commercials.
So, what's in store for 2025? If this year taught us anything, it's that predicting the future of AI is about as reliable as a GPT-generated weather forecast. But one thing's for sure: It won't be boring.
We're spending time with actual humans for the next couple of weeks, but we'll be back in your inbox on January 9 with expert predictions from some of the smartest minds in marketing and tech.
Until then, may your prompts be perfect and outputs pristine as we wrap up Q4 and slide into the new year.