The 2024 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas earlier this month placed a major emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will impact consumer devices and services going forward. Several major companies made significant announcements related to AI, with Nvidia and Microsoft unveiling especially ambitious plans.
Nvidia Cements AI Leadership
Nvidia was one of the stars of CES 2024, showcasing its latest AI platforms and partnerships. The company made it clear that it intends to be at the forefront of the AI revolution across consumer and enterprise devices.
As reported by MarketWatch, Nvidia rolled out its newest generation of AI chips and proclaimed its leadership in the “AI PC race” that is expected to dominate technology over the next decade. Nvidia’s latest offerings boast substantial performance gains over previous generations that will bring more advanced AI capabilities to PCs, data centers, autonomous vehicles, and other devices.
The company also highlighted partnerships with every major PC maker – including Dell, HP, and Lenovo – to bring its AI platforms to next-generation laptops and desktops. As Ryan Shrout, Nvidia’s vice president of PC marketing, stated:
“AI PCs are the future. By 2030 we expect to have billions of AI assistants, robots, and self-driving cars supported by energy efficient data centers. CES showed that future is closer than you’d think thanks to AI chips from Nvidia.”
Nvidia is in an enviable position heading into the AI era. Its GPUs are already the go-to choice for training AI models, and now the company is aggressively expanding the reach of its inference platforms. With strong execution, Nvidia does look poised to dominate the burgeoning market for AI silicon across consumer and enterprise segments.
Microsoft Unveils Project Copilot
The other major AI announcement out of CES 2024 came from Microsoft, which unveiled an ambitious new initiative called Project Copilot. Copilot aims to bring advanced AI capabilities to Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office productivity suite.
At the core of Project Copilot is what Microsoft describes as a “next-generation AI agent” designed to be helpful, harmless, and honest. The agent will be able to understand requests, ask clarifying questions, and ultimately provide recommendations to assist with tasks across Windows and Office.
Microsoft demonstrated Copilot assisting with writing emails in Outlook, analyzing data in Excel, formatting Word documents, and filling out forms in web browsers. The AI agent leverages generative and reinforcement learning to improve its recommendations over time based on user feedback.
Project Copilot represents a massive investment in AI from Microsoft and an attempt to directly integrate advanced natural language AI into its products. If successful, it could give Microsoft a significant competitive advantage as AI becomes a baseline expectation for software and operating systems.
The scope of the initiative is somewhat similar to Google’s conversational AI helper LaMDA, but tightly focused on enhancing Office and Windows rather than providing a platform for open-domain dialog. Microsoft plans to roll out Project Copilot capabilities across Windows 11 and Office over the next year.
The AI Product Onslaught
Beyond the major announcements from Nvidia and Microsoft, CES 2024 also offered a glimpse of the AI-enabled future through a wave of consumer products leveraging the latest advancements in artificial intelligence:
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Healthcare: AI is enabling a new generation of wearable health trackers, with companies like Current Health and PhysIQ showcasing smart watches that can continuously monitor vital signs, detect irregularities, and predict adverse events with clinical-grade accuracy.
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Smart Home: Existing smart home platforms from Google, Amazon, and Apple are being infused with more advanced AI to understand natural language commands, automate routines based on user behavior, and control ecosystems of IoT devices.
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Transportation: Automotive brands touted AI-powered driver assistance features that inch closer to autonomous driving, such as intelligent navigation, risk assessment to prevent accidents, and in-cabin monitoring for safety.
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Entertainment: Media streamers demonstrated video upscaling through AI; smart TVs with integrated intelligent assistants; and services leveraging AI for recommendations, search, and even synthetic media creation.
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Smartphones: Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon processor puts a focus on AI with boosted performance, improved power efficiency, and an array of AI capabilities supported out of the box, from intelligent photography to predictive typing.
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Robotics: Companies specializing in service robots continue to showcase machines that leverage computer vision, planning algorithms, and other AI techniques to assist with tasks like delivery, cleaning, and warehouse fulfillment.
This range of products provides a snapshot for how AI will increasingly become an integral part of solutions across every industry vertical in the years ahead.
| Category | AI Capabilities Showcased |
|---|---|
| Healthcare | Vital sign monitoring, irregularity detection, adverse event prediction |
| Smart Home | Natural language control, user behavior automation, IoT ecosystem coordination |
| Transportation | Intelligent navigation, risk assessment, in-cabin monitoring |
| Entertainment | Video upscaling, recommendations, search, synthetic media creation |
| Smartphones | Photography, predictive typing, voice control |
| Robotics | Computer vision, planning algorithms, manipulation, navigation |
The Road Ahead
There is a consensus among technology leaders and industry analysts that the AI showcase at CES 2024 is just the beginning. We are still in the early phases of the AI revolution that will ultimately transform consumer electronics and computation more profoundly than any previous era of computing.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang projected that we will soon have billions of AI assistants, robots, and autonomous vehicles learning from massive datasets around the world. AI is also being weaved into the fabric of semiconductor design, reflected through announcements at CES around initiatives like Cerebras’s wafer-scale AI accelerator and Intel’s investment in AI model design directly on chip layouts.
However, many challenges remain in delivering on the AI vision showcased at CES. Software needs to improve to effectively leverage cutting-edge hardware. Failures like overpromising social robot Ballie from 2020 highlight difficulties in fulfilling grand AI ambitions. There are also larger questions around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and AI safety that must be addressed thoughtfully as these technologies make their way to consumers.
Still, CES 2024 gave technology leaders and investors confidence that real-world AI capabilities are accelerating faster than anticipated across both the consumer and enterprise technology stack. For any company not actively building an AI strategy, it may already be too late to competitive. The AI future is coming quickly, and the innovations previewed at CES suggest it will arrive ahead of schedule.
To err is human, but AI does it too. Whilst factual data is used in the production of these articles, the content is written entirely by AI. Double check any facts you intend to rely on with another source.
