Season 6, Post 49: Janus time, 2024 edition

It has become an annual tradition for the Roman God of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages and endings to adorn the title of our final blog post of the year. We find Janus an appropriate symbol since he is usually depicted as having two faces, looking both to the future and to the past. 

For the second consecutive year, AI dominated the news. Nowhere was this more evident than when your author travelled to California, the technology’s spiritual home, in March (post 12). When asked whether we were in a hype cycle, one Chief Executive said to us, “no way.” Such excitement – or some may still call it hubris – had spread to the East Coast too, as was evident in trips made in both August (post 32) and December (post 48). We were at least reminded that AI is not “a silver bullet” by a leading academic in the field (post 47).

A more sober perspective on the topic would also highlight that any AI is only as good as its underlying data and that data have no value unless they are stored, secured and analysed. This was the contention of our very first thematic piece of work (March 2011) and remains as valid now as it did then. For a recent reminder why, we travelled to Oberkochen in rural Germany. In our most-read Blog piece of the year (post 20, “James Bond, for a morning”), we learned just how complex the process is to manufacture semiconductor chips. Talk to any cyber expert (including Heptagon’s own CTO, interviewed in post 21) and you will be reminded of the asymmetric nature of cyber threats. As Mike Tyson famously said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face.”

These topics will undoubtedly continue to shape investor debates in 2025. Imperative for the AI boom to be sustained will be to see just how quickly businesses are able to build services on top of the infrastructure layer (NVIDIA’s GPUs) they have splurged on in the last 18 months. When services translate into revenues and profits is, of course, another matter. A further discussion is how these algorithms will be powered. Expect to read more about the need to replace ageing grid infrastructure next year, and what mix of energy inputs will be required. One of our bets will be that geothermal (profiled in post 41) will receive more coverage in 2025.

Elsewhere, healthcare and sustainable food solutions will continue to garner headlines. Without wanting to portend gloom, do not rule out another pandemic soon, even if responses to it will likely be markedly different to last time. On a more optimistic note, 2025 may be the year where either humanoid robots or quantum computing go more mainstream. We have discussed both in prior notes (see here and here respectively), but technological advancements mean that there is a greater chance of concept becoming reality next year.

Thank you all for your interest and support over the past year. The Future Trends Blog will return in early January. 

18 December 2024

The above does not constitute investment advice and is the sole opinion of the author at the time of publication. Past performance is no guide to future performance and the value of investments and income from them can fall as well as rise.

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Alex Gunz, Fund Manager