AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

My last newsletter detailing my entire 2024 AI recap was my most read edition ever (~wipes sweat off forehead~). And if my inbox and newsletter stats and client asks are any indication, interest in AI is not slowing down any time soon.

So if you’ve been thinking AI is a passing trend, destined to fade away like light blue leisure suits or Google Glass, then I am sorry to say, it’s time for a reality check: that limiting belief likely stems from one thing… you. You haven’t explored these tools enough to experience your true aha moment.

As I head into 2025, I find myself reflecting on the limiting beliefs people hold about AI—and how many companies those beliefs are actively holding back. Breaking through these misconceptions is one reason I write this newsletter. And another is to read all the lovely replies. And another is to vent. Alright, let’s keep this train moving.

If you missed my recap of the year’s biggest moments and movements in AI and want to catch up on the most remarkable year in AI so far, read it here.

🏆 My 2024 AI Awards 🏆

I went through all of my notes, emails, posts, and texts (and occasionally vivid nightmares) to recap all of the 2024 AI greats across 9 major categories. And it goes without saying that 2024 was momentous for AI. It was the hardest year yet to pick winners (the runners up and winners were neck-and-neck in some categories).

Same caveats I share every year:

1) There will be some overlap in these categories

2) These are only my opinions and you may disagree

3) Inclusion on this list is not an endorsement

Big Tech Winner: Google

The sleeping giant woke up. While there were some low moments this year for Google (I still won’t get over that horrible Olympics ad and the rock-eating advice that made Google search very temporarily hit rock-bottom), the pros outweigh those moments ten-fold. Google touched on everything from small language models with Gemma, to world models with Genie 2, to best-in-class video generation (yes, better than Sora, with unbelievable physics) with Veo 2, to the longest context length in market with Gemini 1.5 Pro, to state-of-the-art ML models with Gemini 2.0, to video input, to the podcast-creating viral hit NotebookLM, to the Willow chip for quantum computing that even stunned Sam Altman and Elon Musk. If you’re looking to work in AI, Google is still one of the best places in the world to go learn and drive impact.

*You will note that some very big names were not included in the runner up section, that is on purpose.

Consumer Winner: Anthropic

I know ChatGPT has 300M weekly active users, but the real AI insiders use Claude right now. One of my top reasons is its writing skills—I find myself prompt editing less compared to any other AI assistant. Claude 3 Opus was a winning release (outperforming GPT-4 on my team’s vibe check benchmark), and Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 has a feature that I call “next best action” that I truly believe is an embedded reasoning model on par with OpenAI o1. They know users need more intuitive interfaces, so they released Claude Artifacts, where you can generate interactive dashboards (here’s another example) or a calendar or micro apps in seconds. Guys, I even made a decision-making bot with Claude Artifacts.

And it’s not just the model or the AI’s helpfulness, it’s also the company’s helpfulness. They know users need a little bit of a boost, so they release extremely helpful documentation like guides on agents and how to use AI inside of Google Sheets, a prompt writer and improver tool in their console, and insightful essays on the (very weird) future of AI. I don’t think they’re doing enough in enterprise at all, but they’ve got the right ingredients to grow.

ChatGPT, Cove, and Perplexity deserve honorable mentions here. And for many, those would probably be your winner. I get it. Lots of great consumer tools this year.

Creativity & Design Winner: Eleven Labs

This team SHIPS. Wow, what a year for Eleven Labs. If you’ve heard a fantastic voice replication, it was probably done on Eleven Labs. If you talked (with your voice) to an AI chatbot on a brand’s website, it was probably powered by Eleven Labs. They even moved into the video avatar space to take on players like HeyGen, as well as on-site assistants to take on companies like Intercom. And perhaps most impressively, despite building tech that literally enables scammers to replicate coworkers and family members for nefarious doings, they have somehow as a company really avoided the negative PR cycle. I remember when building an AI avatar with a decent voice cost between $100,000 and $250,000. Eleven Labs is like…$24/mo.

Business Products Winner: ChatGPT

What I hear in private DMs and client meetings is collectively a lot of frustration on B2B AI tools. And I mean no offense to any of the products in this category (I know these teams are working their butts off), but I don’t think any company has had a true banner year in sales and adoption and customer satisfaction in B2B.

Here’s my thesis: companies spun around quickly after the ChatGPT launch in November 2022, and big players like Salesforce and Amazon spent tens of millions releasing headline-grabbing generative AI tools in 2023. They spent 2023 figuring out team structure, customer motions, product and architecture, use case feedback, and marketing. In 2024, they went after feature development, user growth, retention, cost management, and sales. Many companies realized a year ago that agentic AI was going to be big in 2025, so it is my assumption that many companies have been building agentic solutions in stealth mode throughout 2024 and we will see big releases in that space in 2025, and this will become one of the hardest sections to pick a winner in.

I will likely launch a company-wide training course on becoming AI-first this year. These companies aren’t (yet) incentivized enough to go deep on corporate training because the hype is driving enough adoption to sustain growth, only for adoption goals to fail internally. I think (or hope) that 2025 will be the year. Would your company be interested in a corporate online training for this? Let me know.

Dev Tools Winner: Cursor

As I shared in my 2024 AI recap, this was a standout year for AI and code (and unsurprisingly on that, nearly all software engineers I know had some sort of existential crisis). Github Copilot and Devin were first movers here, but Cursor (followed by v0 and Bolt) really stole the limelight by the end of the year. Engineers are some of the fastest adopters of AI, and the top dev teams leveraging AI are getting big productivity boosts. Some successful use cases in testing and refactoring, but devs still cite issues like the example tweet below. Junior devs especially may be running the risk of over-reliance on these tools.

No Code Winner: Lovable

I’m still not over this tool. For $20/mo, a non-engineer can build and deploy micro apps. I mean, I created an app in under 20 minutes…with only my voice…while laying on the couch…while I had the flu. Here’s one the apps I made using Lovable.

I even have a friend whose daughter just had surgery, and the mom used Lovable to create an app for her daughter to track her pain and recovery. Unbelievable levels of agency are cracked open when you have high-quality no code tools.

Events Winner: Cerebral Valley

Cerebral Valley takes it largely because of the PR and quotes that came out of it. NeurIPS was a close second. San Francisco still gets the bulk of the AI action, but we also saw CVPR in Seattle, NeurIPS in Vancouver, Slush in Helsinki, ICML in Austria, Ai4 and HumanX in Las Vegas, and World AI Summit in Amsterdam. Keep your eyes peeled for dedicated AI conferences or industry-specific conferences with AI tracks (like MAICON for marketers in Ohio in October).

*I had to avoid corporate-specific conferences here because I would be extremely biased, but went to dozens of events in 2024 and hope to see more of you at events in 2025!

Investing Winner: Insight Partners

How can I give this to anyone else? They led one of the most fought over rounds in VC this year when they were selected to lead the Crew AI raise and they led the highest-VC-raise-of-all-time round (basically a private IPO bringing in $10B) for Databricks. AI startup funding hit a record $97 billion this past year. Almost half of the total $209 billion raised by startups were raised by AI startups (a stat I predicted back in 2019), and from my conversations with top VCs, about 90% of their pitches are from startups using AI. It will almost certainly hit over 50% of all fundraising next year.

Research Winner: Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

I almost gave this to NotebookLM but it has had less staying power than I think the Google team imagined (have they added new features since the podcast release? Have they put more horsepower behind it? Why didn’t they capitalize more on this? Come on, Google!). The Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People paper gets the award because it felt like the first representation of AI agents as an organism/form. It wasn’t some single-thread productivity hack for one person on one task, it was a system-oriented view of AI representations of humans. Am I making sense? I feel like I’m not making sense.

Let me try again: 1000 people sat down and chatted with an AI for 2 hours about their lives and beliefs. Then, they used these conversations to create AI versions of all of those people… an “AI Allie” and an “AI Bethany” and an “AI Daniel” and so on. These AI representations were surprisingly good at predicting how the real people would answer questions. And we even see that different AI agents all working together (like a mini AI Sims) kinda works, even creating specialized functions just like humans would, in this paper. Again, 2025 is going to be very very weird with people treating AI agents like employees and teams of agents as real productivity centers.

2025 predictions will be coming in my next newsletter, but let’s just go ahead and assume you’ll see the word “agents” about 100 times.

Stay curious,

Allie

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