2024 Tech Predictions Results Show - DTNS 4925
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Coming up on DTNS, we find out which 2024 tech predictions came true and which ones fell flat. Ah, mine. This is the Daily Tech News show for Monday, December 30th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane.

I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang, as soon as I get my webcam around. There he is. There's Roger Chang. Joining us, very kindly rejoining us from last year's Predictions show to check in on how we did, is YouTuber and host of AI Name This Show and the Talk Techie to Me podcast, Tasia Custode. Hello, everybody. Thanks for having me again. DTNS Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackerman. Hey, hello.

And producer and journalist Jen Cutter. This is the episode where we determine how on target our predictions from last December were about how the world of tech played out in 2024. We will start with Sarah. Sarah, thank you for letting us force you to go first. That's fine. That's fine. Start with your first prediction. What was it and how close do you think you got? All right. So number one was...

my prediction was that VR was going to enter a new life as an office tool with Apple's Vision Pro, you know, kind of taking us forward beyond something that was sort of a gaming or an exercise tool. I said, it's expensive, it's a developer product, and it won't flood the consumer market, but it will make those who've written off VR take another look.

Okay. So, um, that, uh, I don't know, man. I,

You were right about it being expensive. I was kind of right. I was kind of right. Yeah. It didn't flood the consumer market. Yeah, right. I kind of, okay. So just to like take this one, like, you know, back home, I don't think the Vision Pro was the success that Apple wanted it to be. You have a lot of consumer folks just being like, why would I even buy this? It's so expensive.

And you have some developers being like, well, you know, let's play around with this a little bit. We've had a lot of that over the last year. But I don't feel like the Vision Pro has become an office tool in any real capacity. I mean, I have one. That's not what you said, though.

You said VR will get a new life as an office tool due to Apple's Vision Pro. I'm going to be very legalistic in my analysis. VR has gotten new life this past year. You hear more people talk about it as, oh, it's a display that you can be productive with. More people are paying attention to it. And in large part, it's because of the launch, even though it's not because of the success of Apple Vision Pro.

i mean there's there's there's a lot going on here um yeah i think you're right i think you get this one do you okay well thank you um listen i you know i wanted the vision pro to be like you know a runaway hit just because i'm like i want it to be yeah right you know in in yeah and um and it does do a lot of things really well i don't know anybody

Anybody besides, you know, those of us who are specifically testing things like this out, you know, for our jobs to say like, oh, the Vision Pro has, you know, replaced my computer or my desktop or my laptop. It's like, no.

I don't think we're there yet. I think we might get there. And, you know, the Vision Pro and Apple are doing some interesting things that might, you know, come to pass over the next year or two. But yeah, I don't think that, I don't think we're there yet. I just don't.

Anybody else want to weigh in? I wish we were. I feel like you get 100 points for it should have been. Thank you. We're going to get a lot of points like that today. I was trying to speak it into existence. It just didn't exist.

But you carefully crafted it to never say Apple Vision Pro would be like a huge hit or anything. And the stories that I've read have been that the orders that they have sold have mostly been to companies. Yeah. And I'm not even joking when I say like everyone's talking about VR as a productivity tool now, not just for the Apple Vision Pro, but for the Quest and stuff in ways that they weren't before. So, yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. Do y'all agree? Can we give her at least close to a full point for the careful crafting at least? Yeah. Give me a point. I'm giving her a point. All right. Points for hopefulness. All right. Good. Point for me. All right. So the next one, this one is a little easier to not give me a point for it, but I predicted one year ago as threads continues to grow, then X dies. And by the end of 2024, X will be sold off for parts and

Perhaps to the blue sky team. Now. Okay. So definitely got that wrong. No points, no points given, but at the same time, I'm like, well, X did lose a lot of market value to blue sky. So it wasn't exactly what I thought was going to happen. Well, blue sky certainly picked up a lot of users, right? A lot of momentum. Yeah. Yeah. Over the last year. And, and,

Even over the last few weeks, Sarah, there was like an exodus on Twitter. All the scientists have moved to blue sky now. Yeah. Yeah. It's not – I don't know. I mean, for anybody being like, oh, X is dead, it's not. It doesn't. It's not going to be dead for a long time. I mean, unless something catastrophic happens. I don't believe that to be true. But I think we're in a – and I think 2024 is a pivotal year for –

A lot of folks who are like, well, hold on a second. You know, I have options now. Is it threads? Is it blue sky? Is it some sort of mastodon server? Is it X?

You know, is it do I just I don't know, just talk to people on DMs on Instagram chats. Yeah, exactly. It's like sending letters. Well, I think I think people are kind of they're kind of rolling back certain social aspects of things that we've all done for a long time because people are scattered around more than ever.

Yeah, there's definitely splintering. Like once Blue Sky added video, a lot of my hockey Twitter moved over and I was very thrilled about that. But a lot of influencers just said, oh no, threads. I'm making way more money on threads than anywhere else. So they all went to threads. But it is really nice to see hockey Twitter move over to Blue Sky. Science Twitter, hockey Twitter, like, yeah. Journalism Twitter, definitely. They're finding more results on Blue Sky of people actually clicking articles. Yeah.

In my mind, Blue Sky is now like the number one Twitter clone. But is that true or am I just in an echo chamber? It's not yet. No. Well, if you measure it by growth, like acceleration, it might be. As a blade, you might say that. But as full numbers, no, not yet. I don't know.

I think you're a victim of predicting something too fast. Like maybe over the course of the next two or three years, this could become true. But it's always, and I'm only saying this because I do it every year. It's always easy to see a trend and think, oh yeah, that's going to happen by next year. And it's like, no, these things move a lot slower, especially getting users to move platforms moves a lot slower. Yeah.

Plus, the show would be boring if we said, well, not much is going to happen this year. I think a new iPhone will come out next year. In the next five years, but just sleep on it. All right, Tasia, let's talk about your predictions. What was your number one prediction from a year ago today? Okay, guys, just stick with me. AI will change healthcare in terms of vaccine development. You know, I was talking like getting ahead of the next pandemic, fighting antibiotic resistance,

And, you know, me and Mr. Bill Gates, we shared a lot of the same thoughts, though maybe my timeline was a bit more ramped up than his. But I want to give myself a half point and may I make the case as to why. Though I do not know. I do not know about the next pandemic because I'm not psychic. But it already, as we know, is being used in vaccine development. And in terms of antibiotic resistance, AI is being used. So, you know, like...

It can recommend most effective treatments, like based on a few things like patient data, maybe local like resistance patterns. It can help with drug discovery because it can predict like the efficacy of new compounds and it can do this a lot quicker, you know, and like it can also maybe identify antibacterial agents and such. So I feel like even though I don't have real proof, I should get a half point for

No, I know. Hello. I mean, AI is taking over science and the medical field. And one of my points is this almost the same argument. So I'm saving my arguments for that. And I give us both points. Honestly, AI is taking everything over, including medical diagnosis, including, you know, what I'm going to talk about, which is, yeah, drug targets. And I think there's no escaping that.

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right? It is changing healthcare. For good and for bad. Yeah. That, you know, that, that I'd say half a point if, if not, I might even argue for three quarters of a point because I don't know when the next pandemic is, but we're getting ahead of it. Right.

We're trying to. But is AI driving that? I don't know. It's too early to tell. That's why you can't give a full point. We'll all go back here in five years during the next pandemic. Remember this. Nobel Prize. Remember. You will have the clue. It'll be next year. It'll be next year and we're going to talk about this again. I mean, I hope there isn't another pandemic. Right. Because we got ahead of it. Right. Okay. So, Tasia, you had a second prediction. This involves YouTube. So what was it?

Guys, I said, I'm just going to say it. YouTube will kill shorts. Guys, I was wrong. I was very wrong. Not only did they not kill shorts, they made them longer. So shorts can now be up to three minutes. So I'll stick that in my pipe and smoke it.

I was so wrong. They went the other way with it. It was just, I wanted them to kill them so bad. I tried to will it. Yeah. Also, you know, a year ago I was kind of with you. I remember this and I was like, yeah, I mean, who's doing that on YouTube? And I still feel the same, Sarah. A lot of people. I still have not watched a single short. So that's a point for you. I'm not really a shorts person either, but I know that it's very, very popular.

I still don't get it. It has done very well for YouTube. I mean, if they're going to kill TikTok, then that might actually pick up more. So, hey, there you go. Our most popular videos on the YouTube channel for Daily Tech News Show are always the shorts. Exactly. It is a perfect format for really quick hits.

Obviously, big in gaming, because instead of having to watch a 10 minute slog of somebody explaining a two minute thing, I get the short. I still get the clips. I know how to beat the boss. Everybody wins. Except the creator. Because wait, why would you watch my long form content then? This is why it's not everybody wins. Because I'm like, people still subscribe.

But I feel like... You still join memberships. It takes my watch time down. And YouTube says it doesn't. And I have been inside those analytics. And I am convinced it does. Because they try to claim it's like a different platform. It's not a different platform. It's all run on the YouTube backend. So I think it's screwing up everybody's analytics. That's just my aside about it. I have no proof.

Again, that's my aside. So it might be good for you, the viewer, but then for me, it's like, but how do I get eyeballs on the long form content then? Yeah, well, and I think that that's a very...

common grievance for creators, right? It's like, I did all this work for the long form content. That's actually where I did most of the work. You can section something off and add it to shorts. You could do something totally differently also. But many people will be like, all right, well, let's take something out of the long form content that was really what we'd

put a lot of work into and just sort of see where it lands. And shorts has kind of taken off for that reason. Our attention spans are getting smaller and smaller. It's an attention span thing. It's a tick tock thing. Like it's there, there are so many reasons that, uh, this is, this is true and not, none of it is good or bad. It just is different. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't have data on this yet because some of my friends are just testing it out. They make like 60 to 90 minute videos. So they have made trailer cuts. So you're not giving anything big away. You're giving like small snippets to say, hey, click through to watch the video. But they've only started doing that in the last like month and a half. So I have no concrete data on whether that has brought sustainable results.

Yeah, Jen, I feel like that's the play. Like regardless of long form video length, it's, it's gotta be the short needs to just push back to the long content. That's just what it has to do. Extra work for creators. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, Dr. Nikki, you alluded earlier that you were saving some arguments for your own prediction. What was your first one from last year? So it looks like I broke this up into a two-pronged prediction. I wanted to get more in there, I guess. But I was talking about AI and science about a year from now, and there's a positive and a kind of a negative branch there.

So the positive is that I think in research there's going to be an increase in discovery in areas that need a lot of computing like quantum physics and protein structure. And I wrote here Alpha Fold. I'm saying that I called the Nobel Prize when I said that. I'm claiming that. And then my negative was for medical diagnosis. It was already being used a year ago, but more AI being used for medical diagnosis seems to be just getting more and more, but it's amplifying negative biases.

So my maybe half a point on this is that there was NIH did a study on this, although it was in July of this year, saying that it was kind of good at answering questions. But the reasoning for why it answered the way it answered was wrong, which is a little bit scary to me. Like it showed an x-ray of a broken arm and it'd be like, oh, yeah, this is this in this diagnosis. And then a human doctor would say, actually, no, but.

you know you answered the quiz right so um yeah those were my two predictions what do we think you called the Nobel Prize there's definitely an increase in areas that require a lot of computing like quantum physics meteorology was was one that was in your prediction from last year and there's been recently some good stuff from DeepMind about that there is the diagnosis stuff

I don't know, panel. It was kind of an easy low-hanging fruit, too. Seems like a lot of...

Like a .9 out of 10 at worst, right? Yeah. Like on the level of like, did medical research gain some knowledge in 2024? I say absolutely yes. Give her a point. Yeah. All right. Let's give a full point, especially because you named AlphaFold and then it won a Nobel Prize. Yeah. Come on. I feel like that was huge. Yeah. All right.

That's good. All right. Yeah. I wouldn't have predicted that they had won the prize in chemistry because everyone was shocked that it wasn't like a IT prize, but that's not how that works. But there isn't one. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. What about your second one? My second one was my, uh, like let's go big or go home one. So, uh, I predicted that there would be more use of nanobots or mini robots in science, um, specifically in nanomedicine. And I, same thing that we just talked about earlier that like maybe they would help with antibiotic resistance and drug delivery. Um,

Um, it hasn't really progressed. I mean, I'm sure a bunch of people have published a bunch of things about it. But what I've found is that there's been like two mouse studies that made the news about nanobots in like, helping nanobots kill cancer cells in mice, and then like, reducing tumor size, which is cool. And it's definitely a step forward. But it's not like, you know, in humans yet, which is probably for the best, but

You're just ahead of your time. Next 15 years, maybe. Yeah, I'm like, I mean, let's get them to help me. I, you know...

Get them in here. I mean, for something, Nikki, for something like IVF, which is not personal to me, but how would nanobots help you with that? I wonder, and I'm just pulling this off the top of my mind, but I wonder if they would help guide cells to where they need to go and like help implantation in that case. Because they got little motors on them. They're just like driving around. Like little police escorts. That's in my mind how that would work. I love it. I mean, yeah, just like, just burp, burp, burp, burp.

Here we go, nanobots. We're going to fix stuff in there, everybody. I think this will happen, but it's more like a 20, 30-year timeline than like a one-year timeline. Sure, yeah. This is a long bet. But the fact that they've got them in mice is a pretty big step from like just in a petri dish. I think you get at least a half point.

Yeah. Stuff is happening towards what you said. That's true. Definitely. You know, half point. I'll take a point and a half total. It's a nano point. A nano point. A nano point. That's good stuff. All right, folks. If you have a prediction about next year and you'd like to email it to us, we'd love to hear it. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

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Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

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I had predicted that, and I even used the word, that there would be a bloodbath in terms of video game layoffs and video game jobs. And that is exactly what happened. If you check videogamelayoffs.com, it'll redirect to...

to a site that kept track of everything the entire year and it never slowed down, not even for a little bit, even going into December, going to the holidays, still hundreds of people without jobs. And it hit everyone worldwide. It is not constrained to any geographic area. If you're an Asian developer, a European developer, a North American developer, you got hit real hard.

Even like up here in Canada, it's generally considered a safer space for game devs because of the tax breaks in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver. They got hit. Like Warner Brothers just closed the studio. It never happens in Montreal, or I should say rarely happens in Montreal. Like sometimes Montreal studios will get relegated to like finishing somebody else's job that they started, but a full closure is definitely newer this year and just continues to be bad. I'm not sure...

next year is going to be all that safer for game devs. Yeah, this was a tough year. I mean, you get a full point for this one. Sadly. Possibly one and a half points. Right, right. Oh, no. But then we had to eliminate half a point, you know, because we couldn't afford it anymore. Yeah.

more. I mean, on on DTNs, you know, week after week, sometimes we would even have a conversation, you know, just between, you know, whoever was on the show that day before we went live, like, do we really talk about the closures again, you know, but it's, it's, it was very significant.

Jen, what do you think is causing this? Is this just like the bust after the boom of COVID or is it just people don't have money to spend like $80? That's probably too much. $60 on a video game anymore? What is the thing? Collectors editions that are going for hundreds of dollars, skins in League of Legends that cost like $250 US. All that stuff is still selling. The video game awards were not that long ago and everyone's showing off these big AAA games.

which is great, but the year after there's going to be a lot less to show. And I'm kind of curious to see what happens there. Cause even indie studios had been hit really hard over the past year. And a lot of studios that were actually really close to releasing their games just had to junk it. And all that work is gone. Uh,

I think we're going to end up seeing a bunch of smaller games or maybe some studios cutting back to like single A or double A games. But it is a mess and an industry, let's say in transition. Now that some of the big money is gone, a lot of studios are going to have to find new sources and hopefully not triple down on existing IP. Like it'd be someone I'm hoping is going to take a chance and release something actually new.

Yeah, the media business in general overbuilt during COVID and even before with streaming. And then the strike happened. And so I think there's a halo effect there into the video game industry, which was considered to be more successful than media in general. But yeah, it's definitely an evening out across all of that.

All right, Jen, you had another prediction a year ago around search engines. So remind us of that and where we are now.

Well, for my second prediction, I also tried to will something into existence. I had hoped that search engines would at least try to filter out AI sludge and other incorrect things. Like, I believe it was a well known about, you know, how many rocks you should eat a day, whether you should glue cheese to pizza. I'm pretty sure those have been hard coded in so that nobody. No, no. I mean, we all now put glue on pizza. Yeah.

That's what we do. And sprinkle some rocks. So good. You know, so I get my recommended day. It's a twofer. Uh,

I don't even know how much credit I can get for this. There is a very handy site called UDM14.com, which added an operator that helped get rid of the AI synopsis at the top of results in Google. And then back in May in 2024, Google itself said, oh, by the way, if you just click this little web tab, we will give you just text links.

which is definitely handy, but you still have to select it. You can't make it your standard. So you're doing this extra work and then a whole bunch of, uh,

I'm not going to mention any by name because I don't trust any of them yet and all of their reviews are bad. But there are browser extensions for various browsers to help filter that. Like the same way that you can manually tweak your browser to not get Pinterest nonsense and all of your image feeds. There are ways to tweak it, but that work is on you and not on the search engine.

Yeah, I think it's just gotten worse, unfortunately. Yeah, there's just, there is so much of it. Like even my friends in 3D modeling are looking at all of the meshes in current asset stores, and it is so much nonsense. And it's really hard to keep up with because you can just produce this stuff as many times as you have credits for in the AI tools.

And it's really trickling down. In the sense that there are tools to try to filter out exactly what you're talking about. I mean, I agree that you should get like half a point for this. This is actually something that people care about and companies are working on. But at the same time, we're in such a weird AI everything that companies who are running companies

Search engines and browsers, you know, are trying to put that, you know, in everything that we do all the time for different reasons. Yeah.

And you mentioned Pinterest results. I still get those. And I noticed on Pinterest itself, it's almost all AI now. I use it a lot for just like inspiration for like, I don't know, fantasy world building. But yeah, it's all AI. And I noticed something even worse. And this may be just one person, but some of my students use AI as a search. So they'll like use ChatGPT as a search engine. Oh, yeah. Oh, my teacher friends. I'm really worried about that. So yeah.

It's going to get worse before it gets any better. I don't know how we're going to make it better. I mean, actually, it's really easy to make easier, but Google doesn't have interest in that, I guess, for now. Or Pinterest.

Gosh, I haven't used Pinterest in a while. I can imagine that AI would be like the Pinterest. I mean, it's the perfect, you know, peanut butter and chocolate, you know, Pinterest and AI. It's perfect. You know, just like, what do you want to imagine today? You know, that couch that doesn't exist, that's green and, you know, fits in your corner. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of my like students presentations and stuff, I'll have AI images. One of them, I'm not calling out anyone in particular, but one of them showed a brain facing back. So it was like the cerebellum was facing the front and the ears were pointing the opposite direction. I was just like, Oh, see,

See, like if you do that as a joke, that's one thing. If you're submitting it and just showing that you don't know how to proofread, that's less good. I'm concerned, yeah. And I'm not sure that the generation who is growing up with this can detect it well. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know how that's going to go. You'd think they'd be better at it, but it seems like they just don't care.

I don't want to speak for a whole generation. Yeah, of course. I mean, I think I can only imagine, you know, as we are all talking about like, well, hold on a second. Like, what's good and bad about this? If you're in the youngest generation where you're like, I've never known life without this, you know, why is it bad? It's just a tool. It's the problem. And it is. It is. But you have to, you know...

Well, you don't know what you don't know. Like I took my friends who are in 3D animation to say, here is why this is bad. I would not have known that a mesh was bad, except for like the obviously super deformed ones where the face is all like punched in. That one I can tell. But like if somebody showed me a mesh for an arcade machine, I would not know that that is an absurd number of triangles in there. So I did need an expert to point that out to me that, hey, that's wrong.

Yeah, right now AI only works if you're able to independently like verify the information and double check for it. But in the current like

talking about shorts, like attention span and lack of availability to do your own critical thinking and where to do that kind of research. You have to have those tools. That's like tools that you need to be taught to question information. And that is kind of falling by the wayside. And people may not have time or will or just the knowledge that they need to do that to verify this information. And it's becoming a little bit problematic in all types of ways.

types of different little areas, especially if the first thing that you do for searching something is immediately AI. Tasia? Well, I was just going to ask you, Nikki, like, are you letting your students use it openly? Or are you saying, and you're saying to them, you have to fact check, or are they not supposed to be using it at all? So there's in different contexts, they're not supposed to be using it. So I have class that I teach where I say like, hey, we're not going to use AI for this class. There's no reason where you need to be

using it. I don't have written essays or anything. I have been making people do more handwriting because of that, if there is one of those. And then just in general, in research, like kids are in my lab, I'm teaching them about, I don't know, converting microliters to milliliters. I had one type into chat GPT, how do you convert 100 microliters to 100 or like 2000 milliliters? And I was like, you, you could, there's other ways to do that, where you can be a little bit more sure that the information is going to be correct. So it's a weird, like everyday thing, but also,

You can get around it in writing assignments where you can say, include something that's been talked about over the last week, which AI doesn't know what that is, or include the word avocado. And then it tells you about the neuroscience of an avocado. But, you know, that...

It's a bit weird of like, we can talk about why it's good and bad and do a whole day about this. You just have to like work around it because eventually like everyone's using it. Like all of our students, all of my colleagues, at least one of our students has used it in some capacity and they'll either admit it or double down. And it's kind of,

The university doesn't really have good things in place to detect AI. I think most people don't. In the beginning of AI, there was a good way to detect it in writing. And now it's just like the AI writing is getting better. So it can't detect itself anymore. So we can't prove in certain cases that it's AI. And there's just a lot of circle. I mean, wouldn't in an educational capacity, I mean, couldn't you say like, all right, let's, let's put all this into the machine and figure out if,

it tells us the same thing that would, you know, for, you know, more or less say like, okay, the student didn't write this because I got the same. I got the same. You can't prove it in a court of law and no one wants to get sued. Sure. Yeah.

And I can imagine as a professor, you just want to teach people. Yeah. I'll spend a day, I guess, explaining AI, but I don't want to. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to be going through this all day. And the thing is, like with my topics, it's so specific and there's not a lot of actual other research on it. So AI will absolutely make things up. It's also well known for generating citations that are fake because it's not a citation manager. It's an LLM. What?

Generally, I'm talking about ChatGPT. So it just starts to make things up and students don't realize because they don't know the entire, you know, they haven't learned yet the entire background of what's there and they cannot tell that it's made up, I guess. Or they think I can't tell, but I can definitely tell. Yeah. This is scary. So are we giving Jen a half point or a point? Yeah.

I don't even remember. It got worse, right? No, there was a little bit of point because people are working against it, but not Google, just extensions. Yeah, Google only made the concession on here's a web tab to get rid of the AI summary. Yeah, they claim they're making it better. So therefore, you get a half point. I think half point is fair. Half point. All right. I will take it. Tom Merritt, it's time for your predictions.

Sure. Well, we'll start with the one that I think I have a case for, large language model specialization. We started to see people feel that a monolithic model like just ChatGPT, and we just gave a million different examples of this, something unwieldy, maybe even unnecessary, and large language models that are trained for specific purposes. And they now have a name. It's AGENTS.

that can be run on devices or at least locally becoming more popular. The fact that everybody's talking about agents and Google just had a big announcement at the beginning of the month about the agentic stuff that it's going to launch in January, OpenAI talking about all of its agents. I feel like that probably is similar to what I was talking about here. Do you all agree? Yeah.

I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a little bit out of the loop on this. Do they have specific training data that they use to train these specific agents? In some cases. Yeah, Tasia, I know you guys have talked about this some. What do you think? Do I have a case? Yeah, I think you definitely get like a full point in my book because, well, I can only say so much about what Google's going to do in January because...

I test things sometimes, and so I can't say too much, but I think you should get a point is all I'm going to say. And they did have some agentic announcements about what's coming out. So some of it's even out there. But yeah, a lot of these are, you can train on your own personal data set, right? Like you can say, just use this section of data, just use my enterprise level databases, that sort of thing. So I feel like that one is fairly good.

On the other hand, on the opposite side of the scale, I predicted that by the end of 2024, one of these streaming services, Stars, Max, or Paramount Plus, would merge into one of these streaming services, Peacock, Disney Plus, or Amazon. There's still a day left, I guess. There's no chance, Tom. There's a chance. Yeah, I mean.

I don't know. This seemed like a pretty, you never know. We never know with this post-Cable world that we're all living in and trying to navigate through. This could have happened. This was a good prediction. Yeah, I felt like that was a solid prediction. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we all agreed with you initially when you made the prediction. We're like, Tom's so smart. This is definitely going to come true. You're like, that LLM one maybe, but this one, put your money on it. Well, you can get a bunch of stuff through Amazon too. So it's not quite a merger. They just have a bunch of other services in it.

I appreciate that, Jed, but that's just definitely not what I was trying to say. This also feels like another one of those long game bets where it's like in a year from now,

some of this might be true. I should just use this one again in tomorrow's prediction. Go for it. Did the Hulu merger happen this year or was it the year before? Well, the Hulu wasn't even a merger. It was Disney buying out Comcast and then the merging of Hulu into Disney Plus did happen this year, but it was already Disney's service. And I was definitely going for the like, we're going to have consolidation. We're going to have some people buying each other. Paramount and Lionsgate tied up.

But that's the only thing that happened. Things moved a lot slower than I expected. I thought they'd be going. Instead, we got Comcast spinning out its cable stuff. We got Warner dividing its cable stuff. So it looks like that's what they're doing first is kind of walling off the money-losing aspects before they start buying each other up. Yeah, maybe another year or so. Yeah. Yeah. I think you make the prediction again. I'm just mad that YouTube TV is $10 more expensive than it was...

Four days ago. Yeah. Thanks a lot. You know, there's only so many subscriptions I can have.

Which is why I think that the consolidation argument makes a lot of sense. We just didn't see any of these specifically happen. It's going to happen, right? These pieces are definitely paramount and Warner particularly are kind of ready for someone to buy them and merge them in. How is Star still around? Yeah.

yeah, I wouldn't be shocked if stars, uh, was the first to fall because it's from the, the smaller studio. Um, but yeah, well, we'll see. Well, uh, it looks like Jen and Dr. Nikki tied with one and a half points each. I was just a meeting of the minds all around Nostradame. That's what we did. Work to both of you. And I'll never win a predictions show. Yeah.

I think we need to make them more negative. That's how you win. Yeah. Just, just go hard. That's how you win. Apple, Apple's iPhone will sell like crap in China. That's my next. No, too big, Tom, too big. Um, probably. Well, this, uh, it,

It is always fun every year to talk about what we predicted. Sometimes it's a little far-fetched, but mostly it's because what we think is going to happen does sometimes happen. So congrats to all of you for the points that you got. And let's go around the horn and thank our panel because this was a really fun show. Dr. Nikki Ackermans, we'll start with you. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work.

Well, they can find me on NicoleAckermans.com and I've now officially moved over to Blue Sky. I think I'm at Ackermans, Nicole or something like that. But Dr. Headbutt all around is where you can find my stuff. And this was very fun. Thank you for inviting me back. Well, it was great to have you. Tasia Custode, you too. Let folks know where we can keep up with your latest.

head on over to my YouTube channel. It's just the name, Tasia Custode. So you can go to youtube.com slash Tasia Custode or slash at Tasia Custode, whichever, it all works. And I'm always posting a ton of tech tips, lots of Google tips and tactics there. And maybe some agentic AI soon. But no short name. No short. Right, right. And Jen Cutter, always a pleasure to have you as well. When you're not playing hockey, where can we find you?

Well, I am Jen Cutter on every social media and I do use every social media, though I am having the most fun on Blue Sky. And then I will fix my websites once WordPress figures out what they're doing. I haven't decided whether to stick with that or just go back to hard coding. That would have been a good prediction, you know, a year ago. But who was to know? Who was to know?

Well, patrons, we love all of you. Thank you so much for supporting us. Couldn't do the show without you. So thank you and happy holidays.

We have something for you too. If you didn't get a DTNS sticker for your holiday present or you're like still racing around for some last minute present that you're late on, the stickers are still available at dailytechnewsshow.com/store. There are art by Len Peralta of Roger and me and Sarah. You can check them out for $4.99 each or $12.99 for all three plus free shipping. That's dailytechnewsshow.com/store. Oh, the stickers are great.

am loving them even though it's us they're adorable yeah we'll be back we'll be back yeah i mean you know whatever uh yeah len did a good job as you hey who's that oh it's a sticker of myself yeah i love it i'm gonna put it on my laptop is that weird to you

But we know it's yours. We will be back with live shows starting January 2nd. That's at 4 p.m. Eastern, which is 2100 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewsshow.com slash live. And we'll see you tomorrow with our tech predictions for 2025 with David Burke. See you next year, guys. Rob Dunwood and Justin Marbion. The DTNS family of podcasts.

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