TECHSTORM Summer 2024 Forecast
Apologies for a somewhat delayed Summer 2024 Techstorm Forecast. Unfortunately, I can’t blame too many umbrella drinks; there’s simply been way too much work, to be honest. Also, although I’m not much of a sports fan, I got hooked on the Paris Olympics. Not the four-hour opening ceremony or the loooong wait for the anticlimax when Tom Cruise appeared in the end. Instead, I couldn’t stop watching the women’s trap final where Adriana Ruano Oliva from Guatemala set a new Olympic record and secured the country’s first-ever Olympic gold medal. I also got hooked on kayak cross, beach volleyball, and race walking, but that’s a different story.
In these times of polarization, conflicts, geopolitical tensions, and de-globalization, I found the Paris Olympics to be a haven of brother- and sisterhood across countries, continents, teams, and athletes. Of course, with a few exceptions…
From a technology perspective, many things are happening in sports these days. New materials find their way into running shoes and pole vault poles. Nowadays, athletes monitor everything from heart rates and oxygen levels to calorie intake and sleep patterns. For us watching, an ever-increasing overlay of statistics and trivia information fills the screen — sometimes helpful, other times annoying.
The Techstorm Summer 2024 Forecast
Enough about sports. Now, over to the Summer 2024 Techstorm Forecast. No new entrants on the Top 10 list, but there’s been more movement than usual.
Generative AI is still securing the #1 spot; no surprise there. VCs are waking up to the notion that Generative AI and Artificial General Intelligence are entirely different. The former is available now but not intelligent per se, and the latter will outsmart us all and be available next year, in 2029, or never, depending on who you ask.
I definitely see some investor sobering at the horizon, and my earlier puzzlement that people were investing in Gen AI without a clear understanding of LLM moats, competitive edges, technology growth prospects, or limitations has been confirmed many times over. We will most definitely see a tsunami of Gen AI investment write-offs in the coming years. That said, the field will follow the regular route from hype through disappointment to develop into something useful.
Even in the financial sector, the so-called experts don’t know what to make of this. Earlier this summer, Goldman Sachs published a report highlighting the Gen AI bubble, and just the other day, the same people published a revised report arguing for “tech’s rational exuberance”.
Cognitive Robotics are climbing on the list. This field is rapidly going from totally creepy to somewhat creepy:
Use cases are still a work in progress, but the idea that you have robots doing your laundry so that you can do art, and not the other way around, is, of course, tempting.
Other notable mentions are minor backlashes in quantum computing and extended reality. Both fields are struggling with finding killer apps that justify the investments needed in hardware, albeit on totally different levels.
Behind the top 10 list is the Techstorm 42 Matrix, which monitors strategic relevance and urgency over time. This update has been challenging. So much is happening, and there’s a kind of congestion on the grid. When I look back on the grids since the first one in 2017, it’s clear that the timescale has shrunk.
I’ve tried hard to make the Top 10 list a snapshot of the current situation in deep tech investments and the 42 Matrix a map for decision-makers to use in their tactical and strategic work. Behind these is the list of enabling technologies that are constantly monitored. Not that anyone will notice (or not even care), but I’ve spent the summer going deep down the enabling technologies rabbit hole. Actually, it was more of a black hole when I think of it. With the intention of limiting the 116 enablers on my list, I instead ended up increasing it to 155 technologies upon which we build “everything”. If you’re curious about the process, I wrote about it a few years ago.
As always, share, comment, and/or forward to interested or clueless people in your network! ✌️🤘
Stay curious and a bit skeptical!
... Nicklas
One More Thing …
Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter was published last year, and this summer, the series adaptation was released on Apple TV+. I was very impressed with how they managed to turn a book about parallel universes into something coherent, thrilling, and somewhat understandable — highly recommended, in other words.