Two years ago, the air felt different if you were even remotely paying attention to the tech world. It wasn't just the usual post-holiday slump. January 2024 was the exact moment the industry stopped "experimenting" with AI and started panicking—in a productive way—about how to actually make it work.
I remember looking at the headlines back then. It was a weird mix of optimism and "wait, what just happened?" We were exactly one year out from the initial ChatGPT explosion, and the novelty had finally worn off. Businesses were suddenly asking the hard questions: Is this actually making us money? Or are we just paying massive API bills for a glorified chatbot?
What Really Happened in January 2024
If you look back at the week of January 17, 2024, the big story wasn't just a new gadget. It was the Samsung Galaxy S24 launch.
Why does that matter now? Because it was the first time a major hardware manufacturer bet the entire farm on "Galaxy AI." They weren't selling better cameras or faster chips anymore. They were selling Circle to Search and Live Translate. It felt like a gamble. Honestly, some people thought it was a gimmick. But looking at where we are in 2026, that was the pivot point. We moved from AI living in a browser tab to AI living in our pockets, integrated into the OS.
At the same time, the labor market was taking a massive hit. Google and Amazon started the month with significant layoffs. It sucked. But it signaled a shift in corporate DNA. They weren't just cutting costs; they were reallocating every single cent toward compute power and LLM development.
The Vision Pro Hype Cycle
Around mid-January 2024, Apple officially opened pre-orders for the Vision Pro.
The price tag—$3,499—was a punch in the gut for most consumers. People were divided. You had the enthusiasts calling it the future of "spatial computing" and the skeptics calling it a heavy, expensive face-computer. What’s interesting is that while the Vision Pro didn't become a mass-market iPhone replacement overnight, it forced every other developer to rethink how we interact with screens.
I’ve talked to developers who spent that entire month rewriting code because they realized "point and click" was dying. "Look and pinch" was the new goal. It was a frantic, messy time for UI design.
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Why 2024 Was Different From the Crypto Craze
A lot of people like to compare the AI boom of early 2024 to the NFT and crypto bubble of a few years prior. They're wrong.
Crypto was largely speculative. By January 2024, AI was already doing the work. Microsoft had just overtaken Apple as the world’s most valuable company. That didn't happen because of hype; it happened because Copilot was already being integrated into Excel and Word. People were actually using it to summarize meetings they were too tired to attend.
It was a utility play.
There's a nuance here most people miss: The "Great Reset" of 2024 wasn't about building bigger models. It was about making small models fast enough to run on a phone without burning a hole through your pocket. We saw the rise of "Small Language Models" (SLMs) like Microsoft's Phi-2. These were tiny compared to GPT-4, but they were smart enough for specific tasks.
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The Regulatory Panic
Governments weren't sitting still either.
Two years ago, the EU was finalizing the AI Act. This created a massive rift. On one side, you had European regulators trying to prevent a "Black Mirror" scenario. On the other, you had tech leaders like Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng warning that over-regulation would kill innovation. It was a high-stakes game of chicken.
The Misconception of "Peak AI"
Some critics in early 2024 claimed we had reached "Peak AI." They argued that since GPT-4 hadn't been radically superseded in a few months, the tech had plateaued.
That was a huge miscalculation.
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The industry wasn't stalling; it was digesting. You can’t just throw a trillion parameters at a problem and hope for the best. You need data quality. In early 2024, the conversation shifted from "more data" to "better data." Companies started suing AI firms (remember the New York Times vs. OpenAI suit?) and the legal reality of training models became the biggest bottleneck in the room.
It wasn't a plateau. It was a pivot toward sustainability.
Lessons From the 2024 Shift
If you’re looking at your career or your business today, you have to look at the seeds planted two years ago. The people who "won" the last two years didn't just learn how to write prompts. They learned how to build workflows.
- Workflow over Chat: The winners realized that "chatting" with an AI is a slow way to work. They focused on agents—systems that could execute tasks in the background while they slept.
- Privacy became a Product: In early 2024, if you could prove your AI didn't leak corporate secrets, you had a goldmine. This is why "On-Device AI" became the buzzword of the year.
- The End of the Generalist? Not quite. But January 2024 showed us that "average" work—writing a generic email, coding a basic landing page—was now worth zero dollars. The value moved to the "last 10%." The human touch. The edge cases. The stuff AI still hallucinations through.
What to do now
Don't look back at January 2024 as just another month on the calendar. Use it as a benchmark.
Audit your current tech stack. If you are still using AI the same way you did two years ago—just asking it to "write a blog post" or "summarize this PDF"—you are falling behind. The tools have evolved from "assistants" to "collaborators."
Check your data privacy settings again. The models are more hungry than ever, and the opt-out windows are getting smaller. If you're a creator, focus on "Proof of Personhood." Use your unique voice, your weird anecdotes, and your specific experiences. Those are the only things that haven't been commoditized yet.
The frantic energy of two years ago has settled into a steady, relentless march. Make sure you're marching in the right direction. Stop treating AI like a magic trick and start treating it like the infrastructure it has become.