The year 2024 is off to a flying start for the technology sector. Literally, while automobile manufacturers and many other manufacturers have only one expression in mind to tout their presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas: generative artificial intelligence.
In the city of sin, the CES has not yet officially started and we have already massively adopted the English expression “GenAI” to talk about this new wave of applications driven by computer algorithms closely or closely related to far from systems for automated understanding and generation of natural language like ChatGPT, from the Californian company OpenAI.
GenAI, as in “Generative AI”, or generative AI, therefore. It’s everywhere at CES at the beginning of January. By extension, it will spread in the coming months, both in North American stores and in advertisements from manufacturers of almost everything that plugs into an electrical outlet.
8K TV powered by AI
For example, Korean company Samsung is leading the charge in televisions with a new line of oversized devices, the resolution of which is rivaled only by giant screens in stadiums and arenas. Its most spectacular televisions are 140 inches diagonal. There is almost nothing below 70 inches.
The semi-serious joke circulating in the aisles of the Convention Center at the Caesars hotel-casino where Samsung has established its command post this week is that you will now have to buy a television, have it delivered in a truck capable of transport such a large slab, then build your house around it, since it doesn’t fit in the corridors.
And these TVs, obviously, have a lot of pixels to activate. We saw TV move to HD fifteen years ago, then to Ultra HD five years ago. This year, 8K is making its more widespread appearance. 8K image resolution is four times higher than Ultra HD, also known as 4K. It contains just over 32 million pixels, compared to around 8 million for 4K.
The catch is that there are virtually no sources of 8K content available to the general public. So, what are the manufacturers offering? To integrate into their devices image enhancement technology capable of converting an HD or Ultra HD television signal into a full 8K resolution image.
And this is where generative AI comes in: it must interpret a lower resolution image and “generate” the missing pixels to trick the viewer’s eye into believing that their enormous television has not been bought in vain.
Hello, car!
At CES there is an autonomous stroller driven by an AI that allows the mother to walk with a latte and a phone in her hands without losing sight of her precious baby. There are household appliances, such as an electric barbecue and a shoe refrigerator, whose behavior is optimized several times every second by clever algorithms.
There are also several automobile manufacturers. If BMW stole the show in January 2023 with its concept of a vehicle whose body could change color on its own, this year, it is its rival Mercedes-Benz which seems set for glory.
The manufacturer from Stuttgart, Germany, unveiled at the opening of the 2024 edition of CES a series of new applications, including a virtual assistant animated by generative AI, which will be added to the multimedia system of its future vehicles.
Mercedes-Benz, like most other major manufacturers, hopes by the end of the decade to pocket tens of billions of dollars each year thanks to applications and services sold by subscription to car owners. For these services to work, it needs a scalable multimedia system. This will be the role of its MB.OS system, just presented in Las Vegas. MB.OS is expected to be released to the market by 2025.
This internally developed system is accompanied by a generative AI assistant described as “empathetic” which can adopt certain emotions, depending on how the driver behaves behind the wheel, and generate more detailed answers to their questions, to help him get to his destination better. Mercedes-Benz has already been testing a version of ChatGPT, from OpenAI, in some of its cars for several months in the United States.
Thanks to a collaboration with American artist will.i.am, Mercedes-Benz is also introducing an automated music playback function that will adapt its tempo to driving. All this will pave the way for a slew of new information or entertainment services that the manufacturer hopes to sell to its customers in the form of monthly subscriptions, a strong trend in the automotive industry these days.
Everyone… or almost
The American Consumer Technology Association organizes CES. This year marks the 100e anniversary of this annual event. We expect attendance records: more than 130,000 visitors, more than 4,000 exhibitors, more than 1,200 tech start-ups.
However, the main name heard on site is ignoring CES: Apple. The manufacturer of the iPhone and the Vision Pro mixed reality headset is not here, but that does not prevent several exhibitors from offering accessories for its products, or rival technologies, in such large numbers that we would not be not surprised to come across the company’s CEO, Tim Cook.