2023 was definitely the year that the AI market started to explode, with the revolution kicked off by ChatGPT & Dall-E blossoming into thousands of companies and apps built on top of or around competing technologies.

Some of the exciting tech that came out of 2023 include:

• GPT-4, Claude, Bard, Mixtral and other foundation models which saw leaps in capabilities, and started to incorporate multi-modal generation and interaction
• Image generators like Midjourney & StableDiffusion which can generate truly amazing quality images
• Incorporation of AI tech such as generative-fill and denoising in Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom
• AI powered image upscaling via Magnific, which took Twitter/X by storm
• Several AI-powered voice cloning tools
• Several AI-powered music generation tools
• AI-powered VFX from Wonder Studio and Gen-2
• AI-powered video generation starting to get pretty decent
• AI-powered 3D object generation starting to get pretty decent
• NeRFs (Neural Radiance Fields) and improvements in 3D capture
• Lots of AI-powered coding assistants & tools

Those were some of the highlights for me, and I got to play with most of them.

For me personally Photoshop with generative-fill has been the greatest game changer, saving me hours when editing photos & images and allowing me to do things that just weren’t possible previously with my limited graphic design experience.

I played around with image generators like Midjourney a bit, but didn’t use them as much as I expected… maybe I just haven’t been creating much content that uses images, and for the content I do like dance content, the image generators just aren’t very good yet. I really need to start playing around more with Stable Diffusion with control net.

My robot dance video using Wonder Studio also became my most watched video of all time, with over 5 million views across Instagram & Facebook. I even got paid to do a couple projects using the technology. Something I want to explore more in 2024.

I feel like AI so far has provided me with incremental improvements in some workflows and some new capabilities (like better coding & better image editing) but I feel like it still hasn’t made a profound difference in my life yet.

My goal over the next few months is to continue experimenting with the technology, and find better ways to incorporate AI into my personal & professional life. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds, and I need to find ways to better leverage it and take advantage of the new opportunities it is opening up.