From a year of acrimony to one packed with acronyms
The year 2023 was characterized by a belligerent, acrimonious world. And 2024 promises more of the same. To try and make sense of it, here is a somewhat acronymous look at the world ahead.
Some of these initialisms made it into our consciousness only last year. Others have been in usage for a while. We can expect all of them to become more widely recognized this year.
Isro: The Indian Space Research Organisation had a banner 2023, with a pioneering soft-landing on the south side of the moon. On 1 January 2024, India’s space agency placed its X-ray Polarimeter Satellite in orbit, and has six major upcoming missions this year. The most noteworthy are Gaganyaan 1, which will prepare India for manned space flight, and Mangalyaan 2, India’s second mission to Mars.
Nasa and Isro will collaborate in launching NISAR, a high-resolution radar-based earth mapping system. At the invitation of Nasa, an Indian astronaut might visit the International Space Station this year. Nasa also plans to launch a spacecraft that will explore one of Jupiter’s largest moons, Europa.
LLMs: If there was one phenomenon that defined 2023, it was artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs). It is likely that OpenAI released ChatGPT 4.5, its latest LLM version, by stealth just before year end. This version will represent a marked improvement over ChatGPT 3.0 that took the world by storm early last year.
Google’s Gemini and Meta’s LLaMA are among its many competitors. Now that this race is well and truly on, look for AI in general, and LLMs in particular, to make an even bigger impact in 2024. While technological change is not new to the world, a technology transformation that grows by an order of magnitude (10 times or more)
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