2024, a year well worth waiting forty years for

Published: January 1, 2025

A few thoughts on the 2024 that just ended.

2024 has been the year I had been yearning to live with all my strength since I was 15. I had almost given up. I almost no longer believed that during my lifetime, I would actually experience a year where I spent more time talking to machines than to my fellow humans—a dream I had chased with overwhelming impatience and unwavering persistence for decades, ever since that distant evening 40 years ago when, at 15, I first saw a man speak to a machine in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have no reason to deny it—2024 has been the most wonderful year of my life. So far.

It's been the year when every piece, every ambition, every dream, and every wild, irrational, and improbable scenario I had ever wished for unfolded before me with such audacious determination that it felt almost violent. It was a year of coincidences, timing, and circumstances so unpredictable that I spent most of it utterly astonished. Only in the last 40 days or so have I been able to fully process it all, recognizing the magic that had been forcefully manifesting itself, pushing me toward a place I thought it was still too soon to dare venture.

Now I know where everything that has taken shape over the past year—and, truthfully, the past 40 years—must lead. My desire to officially announce what I intend to work on, and have already begun working on, having demonstrated its feasibility, is overwhelming. Yet, at the same time, I understand there's no rush. It's better to do things right, even if that takes a few more days, than to let myself be swept up by the frenzy of wanting to reveal something prematurely, skipping steps that are crucially important at the start—not only because they lay the foundation but also because, and this is one of the cornerstones of my next venture, I will be doing something no one else has ever attempted, something that many around the world are eagerly waiting for someone to finally achieve. And that's where I'll stop—there's no way you'll find any more spoilers in this post. 🙂

Instead, I'll write about what's truly important—what I've learned so far and will try to carry forward into my next entrepreneurial adventure. And I'll start right off with the sharpest dart, the most searing stone I've been waiting to remove from my shoe for five years now: I, Antonio Sorrentini, was among the very first and very few in the world to predict, years ahead of everyone else, what was about to happen. I was among the few worldwide to foresee that artificial intelligence would replace humans first in creative tasks and only later in repetitive ones. The proof lies in my early 2020 articles:
https://antoniosorrentini.com/a-realistic-path-to-artificial-general-intelligence-part-I/

But it's not just talk. During those years, I was the first and only person in the world to create a platform that concretely demonstrated what I claimed in my articles: a platform that generated images based on natural language descriptions years before DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion. I know what you're thinking: Why does no one know about it? Why didn't you pitch it to Y Combinator? Why didn't you launch your platform? But most of all, you're likely asking: What kind of nonsense are you talking about? There's no evidence to prove any of this.

Let's start with that last point: the evidence exists and is plain to see.
Luckily, during a moment of sarcastic recklessness, I posted a TikTok video of the platform I'm talking about. That video isn't falsifiable—check the date. It's proof that I indeed did what I now claim to have done.
https://www.tiktok.com/@antoniosorrentini/video/6771777609589165317

Did I pitch the platform to Y Combinator? What do you think? Of course I pitched it to Y Combinator, along with over 200 other VCs and incubators worldwide! Many responded, several wanted to meet over video calls, and during those calls, they were over the moon. They all said, "What you've built is incredible, fantastic! Congratulations!" But then added, "We just can't imagine even remotely what it could be used for. Sorry, but we're not interested!"

Y Combinator gave a similar response. After browsing the demo site I had prepared for them for about half an hour and verifying that everything worked as promised, they reached the same conclusion.

Why am I talking about this now? Do I feel the need to shout from the rooftops that it was they—the world's top experts—who failed to understand anything back then, and not me who was wrong? What kind of silly satisfaction am I seeking?

None, actually. I'm not bringing this up to boast or to excuse myself for not having built an empire out of my early understanding of the field. I'm mentioning it because of the lesson I learned from that experience. The lesson is that if you believe in something others can't yet "see", you must find a way to move forward on your own instead of lamenting the lack of belief in you. Not that I ever really lamented or gave up, or stopped persevering in what I believed in. Back then, I only stopped because the pandemic shifted the world's attention toward areas that would have made it impossible for me to gain traction with my product/platform. So, I chose a different path, one that nonetheless taught me a great deal.

However, today I find myself in a similar situation.

That's why I want to revisit the experience of those years.

Today, I have an incredibly clear vision of what will happen in the next 5–10 years in the AI sector. Yet, I see a total, complete, incomprehensible, and tenacious inability among most players in the industry—including the biggest names like Sam Altman and Elon Musk—to grasp the same things I see. Forgive my arrogance, but even they don't understand a thing about what's about to happen or where the AI sector is heading—and rightly so.

This time, I'm not saying this in the hope that someone will finally believe me ahead of time. On the contrary, I'm saying it because I'm certain no one will understand me, so instead of trying to preempt others by years and writing today about what will happen, I'll simply ride the wave alongside everyone else, appearing to surf it at their pace while consistently anticipating the new directions the market will take—ones I will know before anyone else.

Still, I won't be entirely secretive. Since no one believes me anyway, I'll also allow myself the freedom to write calmly in advance about the things I'm about to do.