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Gartner publicly unveiled its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies today, and it places generative AI about where you would expect: On the far side of the Peak of Inflated Expectations and on its way into the dreaded Trough of Disillusionment.
Every August, around when children return to school and pennant races begin to warm up, Gartner analysts give us their thoughts on the hot new tech of the day. From digital twins and the metaverse to data fabric and smart dust, there is no technology that falls outside of the purview of the digital prognosticators from Stamford, Connecticut.
Generative AI first appeared in the 2020 version of the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, where it was spotted next to composite AI and adaptive ML. OpenAI had already released GPT-3, and was turning some heads for its human-like responses.
By 2021, GenAI was still climbing out of the Innovation Trigger phase of the hype cycle, as the analyst classes warned that large language models were spurring a wave of disruption as a result of unexpected emergent capabilities.
GenAI was completely left out of the 2022 edition of the Hype Cycle, even as image models like OpenAI’s DALL-E were turning heads at what Gen AI could do. Gartner instead focused on things like NFTs, digital humans, and the metaverse.
But after OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the cat was out of the bag, and GenAI made a triumphant comeback to the Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech in 2023, where it reappeared at close to the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technology 2024 (Image courtesy Gartner)
As the hype for GenAI begins to die down and companies search for use cases that will actually drive value and a return on investment (ROI), Gartner pushed the tech further along its way. It’s still in the Peak of Inflated Expectations region for the 2024 edition of the Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech, but it’s right on the cusp of entering the Trough of Disillusionment. After that, if everything goes as planned, it will enter the Slope of Enlightenment followed by the Plateau of Productivity.
GenAI will evolve over time to serve useful purposes, says Gartner’s Distinguished VP Analyst Arun Chandrasekaran.
“Generative AI (GenAI) is over the Peak of Inflated Expectations as business focus continues to shift from excitement around foundation models to use cases that drive ROI,” Chandrasekaran said in a press release. “This is accelerating autonomous AI. While the current generation of AI models lack agency, AI research labs are rapidly releasing agents which can dynamically interact with their environment to achieve goals, although this development will be a gradual process.”
Gartner sees GenAI belonging to an emerging class of AI that it dubs autonomous AI, which are AI systems that can operate with minimal human oversight, improve themselves, and make good decisions in complex environments.
“These advanced AI systems that can perform any task a human can perform are beginning to move slowly from science fiction to reality,” Gartner says. “These technologies include multiagent systems, large action models, machine customers, humanoid working robots, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning.”
Don’t let AI take your eyes off the ball, Chandrasekaran warns. “Even as AI continues to grab the attention, CIOs and other IT executives must also examine other emerging technologies with transformational potential for developers, security and customer and employee experience and strategize how to exploit these technologies in line with their organizations’ ability to handle unproven technologies,” he says.
Other emerging tech to watch include tools to boost developer productivity, such as AI-augmented software engineering, cloud-native, GitOps, internal developer portals, prompt engineering, and WebAssembly.
On the customer experience front, Gartner is keen on tech like digital twins of customers, spatial computing, superapps and 6G networks.
Security and privacy round out the top four categories of tech Gartner is watching this time around, with specific mentions for AI TRiSM, cybersecurity mesh architecture, digital immune system, disinformation security, federated machine learning, and homomorphic encryption.
Related Items:
GenAI Re-Debuts Atop Gartner’s 2023 Hype Cycle (2023)
Data Observability, Metaverse Land on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Tech (2022)
Gartner Shuffles the Technology Deck with Latest ‘Hype Cycle’ Report (2021)
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