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Nicole Kobie looks back at the last year in business tech – but don’t worry, it’s not all about AI
There’s no question that 2024 was a wild year – and that’s true even if you keep the focus on tech and business.
Google faces being broken up by US regulators. A security company patch took out banks, broadcasters and more around the world. Buoyed by AI, Nvidia became the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
Oh, and we all talked way too much about AI. Here’s our year in review.
Let’s get it over with: AI was the big tech story in 2024. Every big tech company and plenty more startups jumped on the bandwagon, with new models being announced throughout the year. Microsoft pushed Copilot+ PCs with the promise of local AI, OpenAI unveiled a Her-mimicking voice and then rapidly withdrew it after Scarlett Johanssen objected.
Looking wider, Google finally caught up rivals thanks to Gemini. New player Safe Superintelligence stepped onto the scene, co-founded by OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. AI legends Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis won Nobel Prizes, for physics and chemistry respectively.
And all the while we’ve seen a deluge of new and updated models. GPT-4o in May. Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June. Mistral Large 2 in November. Gemini 2.0 Flash in November. Llama 3.3 and Grok 2.1 in December alone. And business users would have taken note of IBM releasing Granite 3.0 in October.
Meanwhile, early versions of AI agents have begun to arrive – again, with plenty of caveats. (“Cumbersome and error-prone,” said Anthropic.)
At the end of 2023, Nvidia’s stock price hovered just under $50. At the time of writing, it’s $135 – which is actually down from a high of $153.
That rise was fuelled by everyone jumping on the AI bandwagon, sparking a rush to build new data centres to run these complicated models. And that required new chips – specifically from market leader Nvidia, though of course it has rivals.
In the summer, Nvidia pipped Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon to become the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalisation of £3.34 trillion. This time last year, experts cheerfully predicted that Apple was the only company on track to top a $4trn market capitalisation – and it still might become the first – but it now faces a race with Nvidia.
Of course, none of that actually matters, as the “loser” will still be worth trillions. Nvidia had the right technology to take advantage of the AI boom, so its future success relies on the success of that technology.
It was a Friday in July when 8.5 million computers crashed and failed to restart.
Airlines, banks, broadcasters and any other company that used a mix of Microsoft Windows with security firm Crowdstrike were knocked offline, with some taking days or weeks to fully recover. The total cost of the outage was estimated at around $10 billion.
The disruption was sparked by a patch pushed out by Crowdstrike for its Falcon endpoint detection and response tool. The update was rolled out early in the morning and halted after an hour, limiting the damage from going any further. Crowdstrike now faces lawsuits.
The incident highlighted the importance of resilience – and there were plenty of other examples to look to for lessons on planning for recovery after an outage. Transport for London was hit by hackers in September, costing £30 million to get some services back online, with others still in the works. Meanwhile, the British Library is still working to get all services back online after a ransomware attack in 2023.
Regulators had plenty to do in 2024, with a long-running Department of Justice case against Google finally coming to a close. Here, Judge Amit Mehta declared that Google had a monopoly in search and violated antitrust laws by paying rival browser makers to install its search tool as the default. That sparked a demand by the DoJ to sell off Chrome and perhaps even Android.
Beyond that, Microsoft is being targeted by US regulators, TikTok faces a US ban and the cloud market got a good hard look amid market dominance of Microsoft and Amazon.
Between layoffs and demands to return to the office, it was a tough year to work in tech. Across 2024, 149,870 staff were laid off from 529 tech companies, with five-digit sackings hitting all the big players, including Intel, Tesla, Google, Meta, Microsoft and more, according to redundancy tracker layoffs.fyi.
Is this a result of AI stealing jobs or more about companies realigning to focus on development of AI? So far it looks to be the latter: Dropbox and Intuit both specifically pinned cuts on AI investment, while others – including Dell and Google – have suggested they intend to invest in new areas, suggesting AI.
Work was disrupted even for those who kept their jobs, with the rise of return to office (RTO) mandates. Most companies have avoided taking a hard stance against hybrid working, instead seeking softer ways to encourage staff to show up in the office, but Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy sent a letter to staff telling them the post-pandemic era of work-life balance was over, in favour of getting back in the same place to “invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other.”
Don’t worry, we won’t get into all the politics of it – you’ve heard it all already. But one notable point from Trump’s second successful election campaign was his turn to tech. That began with his pick of former venture capitalist JD Vance for vice president, but really took off when Elon Musk donated millions to the campaign.
Now, Musk is working alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to set up the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE – yes, they really called it that), with plans to force federal staff back to the office, slash budgets and perhaps even whole agencies.
Alongside Musk’s patronage, other tech luminaries have chucked millions of dollars at Trump for his inauguration event, notably Apple, Meta and even Amazon, as well as OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Trump might not prove too helpful to tech, with a host of tariffs announced and antitrust action possibly on the cards – but that’s something to worry about in the New Year.
