A very happy 2025 to our readers, and welcome to another holiday week AI & Finance, in which we’ll review some of the biggest artificial intelligence stories of the last year. If we were trying to put together a top 10 list of specific stories, we’d have a very hard time picking which ones to report. As with any rapidly expanding and proliferating technology, a lot was happening. 
We feel our readers are better served by rounding up these individual stories into about 10 dominant trends that really set the course for the news over the past 12 months. Rather than focus specifically on financial services AI, we’re picking the overall artificial intelligence trends.
From the editors’ birds’-eye perspective, 2024 was a year in which AI really left science fiction for good and entered our everyday lives and lexicon, in the workplace, in our homes, on our devices and with our friends and families. Perhaps there’s an uncontacted tribe somewhere where peoples’ lives are completely untouched by AI and no one is aware of the technology, but across most of the developed world, it’s here, and everyone, even if they’re not embracing it yet, seems to be using it.
For me, your AI & Finance editor, it’s been one of the best 12 months of my life. At the end of 2024, I find myself happier, healthier and wealthier than I have been in nearly a decade, and I hope that all of our readers can say the same.
If not, let’s all try together to make 2025 a year of joy and positivity.
Let’s get to the final five of our top 10 AI stories of 2024.
1. New Chips
In the public discourse, artificial intelligence is still discussed in terms of software applications—but a new generation of computer hardware technology is also driving the AI explosion, just as the accelerating development and adoption of AI is creating new demand for more advanced computer hardware. Nowhere can this be viewed as clearly as in the race to develop and distribute “AI chips,” computer microprocessors developed with artificial intelligence in mind.
2024 saw several new entries into the AI chip universe, including new chips from Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Amazon, among many, many others. Before we discuss a few of them in detail, it’s worth noting that the rage over AI chips temporarily made Nvidia the largest company in the world in 2024—due to its status as the leading incumbent manufacturer of graphics processing units (GPU), the legacy computer chip doing much of the heavy lifting in AI, Nvidia has enjoyed a head-start on many of its competitors.
Nvidia announced its latest AI chip, the most up-to-date edition of its Blackwell platform earlier this year, but delayed launch. It also announced Rubin, a next-generation AI chipset expected to roll out in 2026. AMD responded by announcing the rollout of its own Instinct MI325X AI accelerator chip, which became available late in 2024. Apple is also moving towards developing AI infrastructure, and not just for its ecosystems of personal computers and handheld devices, but also for data centers.
Meta also launched its own in-house AI accelerator chip, the Axion Processor, aimed at the cloud infrastructure market, and its Cloud TPU v5p, the latest entry in its line of proprietary tensor processing units. Intel, often viewed as an AI laggard, announced several launches in 2024, including its own Gaudi 3 AI accelerator chip and the Xeon 6 CPU, designed with AI in mind. The year also saw Amazon trying to boost its own Trainium2 AI chips.
Startups launched chips of their own, including EnCharge AI, whose technology is being developed via a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense and Princeton University. Tenstorrernt, led by former Intel and AMD engineers, announced a huge VC funding raise (more on AI and VC in just a moment) to develop artificial intelligence-oriented chips of its own. Other entrants with large funding announcements included DreamBig, Groq, Semiconductor, Hailo, Recogni, Etched.AI and Lightmatter.
2. AI Dominates VC Funding
Let’s go ahead and start with the bad news—venture capital funding has not been all that impressive since hitting a peak in 2021, when there were $345 billion worth of deals announced. While final numbers have yet to be tabulated as of this writing, it’s highly unlikely that VC fundraising comes anywhere near its peak. VC funding might not even top its totals from last year, as of this writing, annual totals from 2024 looked to come in about in-line with 2023.
The story as we see it, however, is that 2024 would almost certainly have seen a dramatic decline if it weren’t for the energy—and hype—around artificial intelligence. Again, as of this writing, artificial intelligence capital raises seem poised to account for at least 40% of the total VC funding for 2024, with some industry onlookers projecting it could make up more than half of the year’s total. In fact, a late-year push of money into AI startups might have been enough to forestall a decline in fundraising.
We mentioned last week the multi-billion dollar funding rounds announced by OpenAI and Databricks. Elon Musk’s xAI joins those multi-billion winners with its own $6 billion Series C round. We also just noted a few of the larger raises in the AI chip space. Smaller, but still impressive, rounds were announced by CoreWEave ($1.1 billion Series C), Safe Superintelligence ($1 billion), Scale AI ($1 billion Series F), Figure ($675 million Series B), AlphaSense ($650 million Series F), Poolside ($500 million Series B), Physical Intelligence ($400 million Series A), Magic ($320 million Series B), Liquid AI ($250 million Series A) and Writer ($200 million Series C).
3. AI Search Will Challenge Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo
Internet users everywhere have become highly dependent on search engines. For better or for worse, when we need to find something on the internet, most of us go to Google, or use the search functionality in our web browsers (which is usually powered by Microsoft’s Bing or Google search). Google mushroomed into one of the world’s largest and most influential companies largely on the back of its ubiquitous search engine. At the same time, we’ve also become critical of search engines—the ways their algorithms tend to give us the same kinds of answers, over and over again. We’ve questioned why search engines tend to promote certain pages and websites over others, and critics have complained about how search results are used to target advertisements and other promotions at internet users. Some of these questions, complaints and criticisms have pushed web users towards search options seen as less likely to collect and monetize their data, like DuckDuckGo.
Well, a new can of worms is being opened with the introduction of AI search. AI search has already been implemented in our incumbent, customary search engines. While Microsoft’s Bing embedded OpenAI’s ChatGPT within its search engine some time ago, Google more recently added an AI Overview function powered by its own Gemini large language model. However, incumbent search giants are also being challenged with new technology that some technologists think will make legacy search engines obsolete.
The largest and most influential shot was fired by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which recently rolled out its SearchGPT tool to the broader public at no cost. SearchGPT functions a lot like ChatGPT, but while ChatGPT has a knowledge cutoff date limiting its body of knowledge (the latest version, GPT-4o, has a cutoff date of October 2023), SearchGPT continuously updates its knowledge of the internet in real time, enabling it to behave like an internet search engine.
Several other companies have moved in the same direction. Most notably, a startup, Perplexity AI, launched its own AI search tools that have grown in popularity through 2024. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is also advancing its own AI search tools. Smaller, AI-enabled search engines have surfaced on Reddit (to look through user posts for information), S&P Global (to find insights within large volumes of market data) and ProRata.ai (which uses AI to search through licensed content).
Artificial intelligence search functions are already replacing legacy search engines. The real question will be whether the majority of web users will stick to the incumbents, like Google and Microsoft, or gravitate towards an AI-native newcomer, like SearchGPT or Perplexity AI. Recall that, more than 20 years ago, web users moved from older legacy search engines like Yahoo!, Altavista, Ask and Webcrawler to embrace superior technology offered by Google. This time, Google is not the one with the superior technology—will the search leader of the past two decades be kicked off its throne?
More importantly, and certainly worth a mention here, is what happens to the economy and ecosystem built by search engines and their quirks. An entire industry of publishers, marketers and writers has been constructed around search engine optimization and helping companies improve their standing in Google searches—will AI search really render all of these people and their knowledge obsolete? We may find out in 2025.
4. Big New Partnerships
AI is moving fast, companies are blinking into existence, raising money and being acquired within a matter of months, if not weeks—but a few big partnerships caught our eyes in 2024. As much as we talk about the competition within artificial intelligence (see our entry on AI Search above for a good example), even the largest companies recognize that AI is moving so fast that a more open environment of collaboration and cooperation makes more sense than closed, cutthroat competition.
AI providers and startups need traditional tech companies’ access to decades if huge amounts of data to train their models. Traditional large technology providers want access to cutting-edge AI software and hardware. Everyone needs more data, more energy, more microchips and more space. These needs sometimes make for strange bedfellows.
We could start out with an existing partnership, that between Microsoft and OpenAI, which has only become closer over 2024. Recall that in late 2023, OpenAI’s founder and CEO, Sam Altman, was almost hired by Microsoft before returning to run his company. After Atman’s departure and return, Microsoft took an observational board seat on OpenAI, which it has invested more than $13 billion into over time. In 2024, Microsoft relinquished that board seat over regulatory concerns, but it remains OpenAI’s largest cloud services provider.
Nvidia cultivated and initiated a number of relationships with AI software providers who have, to this point, been largely dependent on its chips, including Google, Meta and Amazon. Another chipmaker, U.K.-based ARM, partnered with Apple and Microsoft while it expanded an existing alliance with Amazon.
Amazon doubled-down on another existing partnership, this one with AI developer Anthropic, adding $4 billion to its investment in the AI firm to bring the total to $8 billion. In return, Anthropic announced Amazon Web Services AWS) as its primary cloud provider, with plans to train its AI models on AWS data.
Some companies sought to go deeper into AI with acquisitions. Companies taking this route include Robinhood. While Robinhood’s purchase of wealthtech and RIA custodian TradePMR caught our attention when it was announced in the second half of 2024, its purchase of AI-infused trading platform Pluto Capital earlier in the year will also have an impact on its services. Robinhood is expected to use the Pluto Capital acquisition to help provide personalized investment strategies and advice, portfolio optimization and data analysis across its platform.
Smaller partnerships grew between AI software and hardware providers and public agencies, non-profit organizations and institutions of higher learning to help the world understand, regulate and develop new uses for AI technology.
5. Leaders and Laggards Emerge and Deepen
A more general point should be made on all the companies and people using artificial intelligence technology. Some companies and industries are moving forward rapidly and successfully with AI. Others are experiencing fits and starts but are clearly embracing gthe new technologies. A few are clearly laggards whose inability to grasp artificial intelligence may doom them in the long run.
Industries who have found clear and successful use cases in AI, and which are moving forward rapidly, include healthcare, where AI is being used most promisingly as a research and diagnostic tool. Not only can AI dig through reams of patient data to give healthcare practitioners a more coherent view on the pathology of diseases, it can also “look” through diagnostic images to find markers of illness that a tired doctor’s eyes might have missed.
Similarly, AI is being used in the biotech industry to help formulate and more accurately test new drugs and treatments, and in the materials industries to fabricate the next generation of products from a nanotechnological scale.
AI is also being used with great success in travel, transport and logistics, where it can untangle elements like supply and demand, traffic and capacity to help firms create more coherent practices and policies. AI is also being used in a similar manner to create efficiencies in manufacturing and agriculture—with an eye towards automation in the future.
In other industries, however, a lag in the development and proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies has opened the doors for disruption. These industries include highly regulated spaces like finance and education, as well as slow-to-move, concentrated businesses like media and entertainment.
Creatives, in particular, have been brought to a crossroads by AI, as artificial intelligence-impacted layoffs are already here in the media, publishing and entertainment industries. Thus far, the response to AI from creatives has largely been one of hostility. 2024 saw lawsuits against AI companies from content creators and providers like the New York Times, which threatened Perplexity AI and sued OpenAI over the use of its content to train AI models. In the music industry, many musicians openly revolted against the rising tide of AI, while others, like Randy Travis, The Beatles and the Jerry Garcia estate, embraced the technology to create new content and forge connections with their fans.
