CES 2024 Preview: Get Ready for a ‘Tsunami’ of AI

For those who’re ready for the hubbub over generative AI to die down, perhaps pull up a chair. The thrill round synthetic intelligence reveals no indicators of quieting—a truth that can turn out to be all too apparent at this 12 months’s CES.

CES, the patron electronics business’s largest annual gathering within the US, is returning to Las Vegas on January 9. It’s a large, four-day-long bustling bazaar of tech, with expo halls crammed to the brim with new devices, hopeful startups, and prototypes that attain for the celebs. CES is a commerce present the place gross sales and distribution offers are inked, the place idea vehicles roll via crowded streets, and the place tech journalists and showgoers alike wander the flooring in search of the standout new merchandise. And this 12 months, most of the merchandise debuting are going to be garnished with heaping globs of AI.

For years, generative AI know-how bubbled beneath the floor of public consciousness. It lastly burst into the limelight in November 2022, when OpenAI launched the primary iteration of ChaptGPT. The arrival of the shiny new chatbot kicked off an AI arms race. For the reason that reverberant waves of this eruption hadn’t but totally saturated the tech business by the point final 12 months’s CES occurred, there wasn’t actually a complete lot of GenAI speak in Las Vegas final January. Because of this, CES 2023 appears to be like nearly primitive in hindsight, arriving a scant six weeks behind the best technological revolution for the reason that cell phone.

That received’t be the case in 2024. “We didn’t get the complete CES hearth hose of AI bulletins final 12 months like we’re going to have,” says Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Technique. “For those who thought it was a wave final 12 months, it is going to be a tsunami this 12 months.”

Anticipate to see AI in every single place at CES: in vehicles, scooters, headphones, cameras, audio system, and televisions. In some instances, these merchandise will merely embody one other method to entry a ChatGPT-style question-and-response service to deal with spoken instructions. However in different instances, the advances might really feel extra impactful. Firms like Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD are anticipated to announce chips that help AI companies on the units that carry them. These chips would course of AI duties domestically, with out having to ship a request to a server within the cloud after which await a response, making issues like laptop imaginative and prescient, voice-to-text companies, and generative computing really feel snappier.

CES is the place the narrative round business tendencies is formed. Sag says that’s what’s prone to occur with the abundance of AI this CES. “AI is simply going to overwhelm every little thing,” Sag says. “It is going to be so prevalent and so dominant that some individuals will simply be sick of it.”