A year ago, it sometimes felt like AI had spread everywhere in some fashion, but it was only a preview of how AI burst into people’s lives, for good or ill.
It would take a whole series of books to cover every transformative update, flashy launch, and embarrassing misstep made by the biggest AI brands: OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Apple Intelligence, let alone every single AI developer.
Still, there are some key highlights worth remembering before 2025 again upends the landscape.
ChatGPT’s endless upgrades
It’s hard to talk about AI in 2024 without putting ChatGPT at the center. OpenAI seemed determined to stay in the spotlight, releasing one game-changing update after another.
In May, the introduction of GPT-4o, followed by the leaner GPT-4o, kicked off the multimodal evolution of ChatGPT in handling handle text, images, audio, and video. The December release of the o1 model brought a new level of reasoning, with sharper and more insightful answers. Proving to be an invaluable tool for everything from coding challenges to creative brainstorming.
ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode brought new vocal interactions to ChatGPT with a range of lifelike voices – including Santa. If you weren’t talking through the app, OpenAI even set up the 1-800-CHATGPT toll-free hotline to call and interact with ChatGPT.
Filmmakers spent most of the year eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video model. While it only recently became available to non-professional filmmakers, Sora’s ability to make animated videos is now accessible to creative minds or marketers on a deadline.
Creative collaboration was also the pitch for ChatGPT’s Canvas Mode, which enables real-time collaboration with the AI, editing and refining projects side by side. To keep things organized, OpenAI also rolled out Projects, a feature that grouped conversations and files into tidy folders. And the expanded ChatGPT Search function helps keep all that information up-to-date and accurate.
To top it all off, OpenAI ended the year with its festive “12 Days of OpenAI” event, rolling out daily updates like WhatsApp integration, a new $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, and a sneak peek at the upcoming O3 model for the chatbot. That probably helped distract from the hours-long outage in December caused by a Microsoft data center failure. The breadth of outrage might not have been great PR, but it did undeniably highlight how much ChatGPT has spread since 2024 began.
Google Gemini’s Leap
Google Gemini didn’t even exist when 2024 ended. It wasn’t until February that Bard became Gemini, and that rebrand was part of Google’s year-long effort to outdo OpenAI by integrating AI into everything it does. A shiny new Gemini app for Android and a Gemini Advanced subscription tier immediately started the competition with ChatGPT, and the upgrades soon followed.
By May, Google had launched Gemini 1.5, an updated version packed with more processing power and an expanded context window, making it more intelligent and better at understanding complex queries. But the real magic began over the summer when Gemini intelligence made its way into Google Home devices and took over for Google Assistant in more places.
That culminated in September with Gemini Live, a feature that lets you have real-time voice conversations with AI. The ChatGPT competition continued with custom chatbots called Gems, and a month later, an iPhone app arrived, complete with integrations into other Google apps on iOS.
The grand finale came in December with the release of Gemini 2.0, a massive upgrade featuring better, faster responses, photo analysis, and more. Not to mention, many exclusive features for Google Pixel phones further connect with the rest of the Google ecosystem.
Apple Intelligence finally ripens
Rumors about Apple’s plans for AI had swirled for years, but 2024 saw Apple Intelligence finally debut. The initiative felt both inevitable and uniquely Apple in its reveal at WWDC in June.
The design was definitely Apple, but there was a notable amount of integration with existing AI models. In particular, Apple will allow its revamped Siri voice assistant to lean on ChatGPT for answers and various queries. We’re also still waiting on Siri’s promised ability to view, understand, and perform tasks within applications.
Even with different branding, Apple’s AI tools seemed mostly aimed at matching or outdoing the features available from OpenAI and Google. For instance, Apple Intelligence powers picture creator Image Playground, as well as Genmoji, which lets you design your own emojis.
The most distinct aspect is probably how Apple Intelligence mostly uses Apple hardware to run AI processes locally or on its ultra-secure Private Cloud Compute servers. That way, Apple Intelligence can perform faster and promise more privacy.
While OpenAI, Google, and Apple dominated the headlines, AI had a much broader impact thanks to other big brands. Meta, for example, introduced the Meta AI virtual assistant, embedding it into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, upgrading and expanding its abilities (including some celebrity voices) throughout the year. Meta also set up next year to be the year of AI smart glasses by embedding Meta AI into Meta Quest headsets as well as the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. Oh, and who could forget the unveiling of the Orion augmented reality glasses prototype?
Not every piece of AI hardware came off so well this year, though. The hype around the likes of the Rabbit R1, a small AI-centered device, and wearables like the Humane AI Pin and Plaud NotePin was very high when the year began, but they’ve all rapidly faded since then and may only succeed as very niche products.
If 2024 proved one thing, it’s that artificial intelligence has officially outgrown its shiny new tech phase and stormed into our lives as a full-blown revolution. ChatGPT, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, and their competitors all showed how AI tools can dazzle and even be genuinely useful when used in the right way.
That doesn’t mean 2025 won’t be without its missteps and errors, but it certainly suggests that it will become a standard part of a lot of digital activities on some level, whether trying to have a game night with friends, entertain and educate kids, or organize our diets and cooking plans. This year showed what AI can do; next year, the question will be, what of those abilities will we actually want AI to do for us?
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
