Alice Chambers |
Microsoft has outlined three key artificial intelligence trends for 2024 including small language models, multimodal AI and the use of AI for science.
“AI is expected to become more accessible, nuanced and integrated in technologies that improve everyday tasks and help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems,” said Vanessa Ho, corporate news writer for Microsoft, in a blog post titled ‘3 big AI trends to watch in 2024’.
Firms can expect to see technology companies developing improved small language models (SLMs) to help foster more research and innovation. Large language models (LLM) help to answer complex questions but they require significant resources to run while SLMs are small enough to run on a phone offline. For example, Microsoft researchers have developed and released two SLMs – Phi and Orca – as part of this trend.
Microsoft expects multimodal AI to be another trend this year where LLMs will be able to understand information from different types of data like text, images, audio and visual . For example, Microsoft Copilot processes images, natural language and Bing search data.
Experts are also anticipating AI tools will lead to more scientific discoveries. “AI is driving a revolution in scientific discovery,” said Chris Bishop, director of the A14Science team at Microsoft Research. “That may turn out to be the most exciting and ultimately the most important application of AI.”