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2024: The Big Picture for AI and Audio

2023 saw the start of arguably the most hotly contested technology race in history. OpenAI released GPT-4 and included multi-modality, with pictures, speech, and file support. Google is arguably back in the game with their competitor, Gemini, although parts of it remain unreleased. Voice technology has seen major adoption across many industries. Many companies like Google, Meta, and others have published AI tools for music, voice, and sound effect generation.

What We Will See in 2024

Widespread AI Implementation: In 2024, almost all companies will be implementing some form of AI. As 2023 was the year of the hype, it found many companies scrambling to assess the risk and define policies concerning AI. Many broadcasters have seen new positions for AI created, both in commercial and public radio.

AI in Music Production: AI will produce better music than humans by the end of 2024. Last week, Microsoft partnered with Suno.AI to include their AI Song Generator into Copilot, their AI Assistant for Windows and Office. Suno.AI is completely mind-blowing. It will generate complete songs in any language and style with just a description. The impact on the music industry, radio, entertainment, and many others will be profound. Windows and Office now come with a song generator.

When every person in the world can generate unlimited songs, it will dramatically change how people consume music and what they listen to. The first court cases on AI-generated material have ruled that there is no copyright on AI-generated work since the US and most other copyright laws use the terminology ‘person’ as someone who created the work. Not just having your own playlist with music optimized by AI as is now on Spotify, but having AI generate the music altogether is the biggest threat to the industry since its inception. AI Generated music will also be one of the most heated debates and legal battles.

Advancements in Voice Technology and Cross-Language Capabilities: Another impact on how people consume audio will be the development of cross-language capabilities, where you can take your own voice and make it speak another language. This exists today but has not yet gained traction. It means that all spoken audio content in the world can be available in any language.

OpenAI and AGI: OpenAI has pretty much achieved all their goals with multi-modality in the past months. You can speak to it, it speaks to you, it can analyze pictures and other documents. It actually accepts an audio file but can only analyze the technical info and not the content. AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. Unlike the current models, AGI can reason and solve complex problems on its own. The recent mutiny at OpenAI is rumoured to have been caused by part of the team’s concerns over a perceived threat to humanity that AGI poses.

The Pace of AI Innovation: Last year saw an unprecedented level of development in supercomputers and chips as the demand for NVIDIA GPU Cards went through the roof. 2024 will see a rise of these new supercomputers that will accelerate the pace of innovation even more.

Other AI Developments to Watch in 2024: Just to name a few: AI image generation will surpass any image generated by a human. AI video generation will mature and will be able to generate a short video that is indistinguishable from one made by a human. OpenAI just announced they will be producing phones and hired one of the inventors of the iPhone. Robotics technology is making massive steps with AI making robots perform complex tasks.

AI for Humanity: 2024 will see further acceleration in healthcare where AI is driving improvements in drug discovery and diagnostics like PathAI’s system that significantly enhances cancer detection. Education will further embrace personalized learning experiences with platforms like Coursera. As AI was pivotal in addressing climate change in 2023, 2024 will see more of these innovations in climate modelling, where Google and ClimateAI have made major breakthroughs. But other aids will become mainstream like Verdigris, which optimizes energy consumption in buildings.

The Impact on Radio Groups: The rise of AI in 2024, particularly for U.S. radio groups, will be the perfect storm. Those that follow the U.S. stock market know that 2023 has been a bloodbath, with almost all radio group stocks losing up to 90% of their value. As interest rates have risen and most of these groups still have major debt, paralyzing the industry’s ability to innovate in a time it’s needed most. The lack of resources and appetite for innovation, also due to the average age of the people in the industry, will unfortunately have a catastrophic effect on these groups. Internationally, groups have been more open to innovation, and a great deal of countries still see growth. However, the state of the US industry will have an effect on the rest of the world, where the major advertisers and agencies operate globally.

First published by RadioInfo. Read original here