Plausible Speculation

It’s been a while since my last post - sadly, this blog is not my top priority in life and starting a full-time job has made it more difficult to spend lots of time writing. I still plan to write more, but I can’t promise there won’t be future long pauses as well - I would rather not publish anything than publish a post I’m not satisfied with.

A year ago, I published a post called Predictions for 2024. I made 12 predictions for the upcoming year, aiming for 75% (or 9 of them) to come true. Before I reveal my predictions for 2025 (coming in a different post), let’s review what I thought would happen in 2024.

Prediction: OpenAI will not lose their overall lead on having the best AI tools, to Gemini or Claude or Grok or anyone. This means that ChatGPT or a successor will remain the most used AI product, the one that the average person views as basically the same thing as just saying “AI”. No company will beat them on language benchmarks by significant margins without cheating. They might get clearly surpassed on image models or text-to-speech or something, but at the end of 2024, when you want to use AI to complete a language-based reasoning task, you’ll turn to an OpenAI model.

Result: Correct. There was increased competition in 2024, from Google, Anthropic, and others. Anthropic’s Claude in particular is especially impressive and I often find myself preferring its style. But no one surpassed OpenAI on language-based reasoning tasks, and no one is far ahead of them on benchmarks.

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