If 2023 was the first year of generative AI for both the enterprise and consumer markets, and the accompanying profusion of large language models, then 2024 was when LLMs and generative AI systems quickly grew and matured.

At the start of the year, people in the AI industry looked ahead and saw regulation of generative AI systems, a flowering of multimodal models, and whispers about artificial general intelligence, or AGI, continuing unabated. A year later, the landscape looks a lot different.