When OpenAI announced a “code red” this month to refocus its teams on competing with Google, I couldn’t help but think back to December three years ago when the companies’ roles were reversed. Google was the one blowing the sirens to get to OpenAI. What followed next month, in January 2023, was the first sweeping layoff in Google’s history. “It’s a difficult decision to cover the future,” as the company explained at the time.
I wonder if the developer of ChatGPT can reduce the number of employees early next year. These predictions inspired me to come up with a whole set of predictions about what could happen next year. Here’s a look at six ideas, fine-tuned by the true genius of our WIRED partners.
Data Center Information
Communities around the world are grappling with the construction of data centers. In the US, many activists organize on social media using tools such as Facebook groups. The Chinese and Russian governments continue to use social media to spread new information masquerading as real news and opinion. Slowing data center development in the US would be helpful to China and Russia, both of which want to surpass the US in industrial and military AI capabilities.
Austin Wang, a researcher at the nonprofit think tank RAND who has studied Chinese-run propaganda farms, says there are no signs of activity at this time. “Many of the newly established anti-data center pages appear to be controlled by real US citizens so far,” Wang said.
But as anti-data-centers begin to grow, China and Russia may try to pile on the low-end systems. And work has gotten easier thanks to AI that can quickly generate images and videos to attract people on social media.
Robot Demos Everywhere
By 2026, tech conferences from the Consumer Electronics Show to Amazon’s hardware event will likely be buzzing about AI-powered robots. Google and other big tech companies have spent years trying to train robots to handle household tasks through repeated practice. But now there is a new round of hype. The type of AI models used in services like ChatGPT and Gemini are being combined with robots in the hope that they will handle tasks, such as folding clothes, with less training and greater accuracy.
This past September, Google released a video of a robot that organizes trash, compost, and recycling in response to a user’s voice commands. When Google executives take the stage at the company’s next I/O conference, I expect them to tell the robot to perform tasks such as, for example, sliding a pizza into a type of oven that has never been seen before and, while it’s cooking, finding a half-full Diet Coke in the back of a refrigerator full of people.
Barak Turovsky, the recently retired head of AI at General Motors and former leader of Google’s AI division, says that advances in robotics are possible because large-scale language models can understand a dishwasher’s manual, learn to operate a dishwasher by watching a video, and understand how to hold a part by describing a diagram. He says: “The next frontier of the great linguistic forms is the physical world.”
