Google was named the 'comeback of the year' for 2024 due to its significant advancements in AI, including the release of Gemini 2.0, Willow AI Studio, and Notebook LM, which helped it regain a competitive position in the AI landscape.
OpenAI was considered the 'disappointment of the year' because it failed to meet the high expectations set by its previous innovations, such as GPT-3 and GPT-4. Despite releasing the O1 model, the anticipated breakthroughs in scaling and capabilities did not materialize as expected.
The 'wow moment of the year' was OpenAI's O1 model, which introduced slow thinking capabilities, allowing AI to break down complex tasks into intermediate steps and validate each step, significantly enhancing logic, reasoning, and mathematical tasks.
Sadie St. Lawrence predicts that agentic AI will be the dominant trend in 2025, moving beyond single applications to create specialized networks that can autonomously handle complex tasks, though challenges around security and permissions between platforms remain.
Sadie predicts that AI integration into everyday devices will accelerate in 2025, with advancements like augmented reality glasses offering real-time translation and more sophisticated personal computing experiences, though not all integrations will prove valuable.
Sadie expects AI-driven scientific research to expand significantly in 2025, building on current successes where AI-assisted researchers achieved 44% more new material discoveries and 39% more patents than researchers who weren't AI-assisted.
The key challenge in enterprise AI monetization is ensuring profitability while addressing security and privacy concerns. Many AI projects get stuck in proof-of-concept purgatory due to difficulties in making them cost-effective and secure for production environments.
Sadie predicts that demand for AI engineering skills will surpass traditional data science skills in 2025, though this represents an evolution of the role rather than a replacement, requiring practitioners to build on existing technical foundations with new AI engineering capabilities.
Sadie St Lawrence returns for her 4th annual prediction episode on the Super Data Science Podcast. Together with host Jon Krohn, they reflect on 2024’s most transformative trends—like agentic AI and enterprise AI monetization—and predict what's coming in 2025, from AI-driven science to the skills data scientists need to stay ahead.
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In this episode you will learn:
(03:30) 2024 AI trend recap
(19:23) Comeback of the year: Google
(27:29) Wow moment of the year
(40:20) Looking ahead to 2025
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/849)