Top Pop Culture Moments That Defined 2024
Taylor Swift, Paris Olympics, Willy Wonka event fail, Wicked, Chat-GPT and most importantly Moo Deng.
Taylor Swift’s Groundbreaking Year
The Eras Tour, which ended December 8th of 2024 earned the highest grossing tour in history. Fans flooded the streets, creating hoards of traffic and swarming in buses and trains. Social Media was filled with people’s experiences at Taylor’s concerts, screaming and singing along to every lyric of her songs. Cruel Summer and Anti-Hero where tracks played in every video on YouTube and TikTok. She won the GRAMMY award for Album Of The Year and was from the Billboard Music, VMAs, EMAs, AMAs, Pollstar and BMI awards. Amid all this she dropped a new album, The Tortured Poet’s Department. What a swift yet eventful year!
Paris Olympics: Unforgettable Moments
Arisa Trew: At 14 years old, Australian athlete Trew represented Australia is it’s youngest ever Olympic champion, earning a gold medal.
Simone Biles: Accumulating 11 Olympic medals across her career, Biles won 3 gold and 1 silver medal in 2024 after a 2 year hiatus.
Karlos Nasar: At just 20 years old, Bulgarian weightlifter Karlos Nasar is a 2 time world champion, winning the Olympic men’s 89kg event and breaking eight Olympic and world records during this. He lifted a clean and jerk of 224kg.
Armand “Mondo” Duplantis: Considered the greatest pole vaulter of all time, Duplantis set an outdoor vault record of 6.25m. Not long after, he beat his own record with 6.26m at the Silesia Diamond League.
Neeraj Chopra: As the first snd only athlete of India to earjngold at the Tokyo Olympics, Chopra left Paris with a silver on javelin. His shirt was admitted into the World Athletics Heritage collection.
Chappell Roan's Meteoric Rise to Stardom
Chappell Roan had been releasing her own music since 2017, with her debut slbum coming out over a year ago in 2023, but 2024 was truly her time to shine. She changed her soft image to one with her firery red hair and strong, bold personality which empowered women. Defying pop standards she brought back some 80s teen style hits like “HOT TO GO’ which inspired a viral dace. Topping the Billboard charts and earning six Grammy nominations, Roan’s song ‘Good Luck, Babe’ was the hit song which brought her meteroic rise to fame.
"That's Me Espresso": The Viral Catchphrase
Oh wait let’s also add, “I’m working late, cause I’m a singeeeerrrr.” Sabrina Carpenter has had a hell of a sweet year indeed with her album titled ‘Short n’ Sweet,’ with Espresso winning Song of The Year which made her first VMA win and with it becoming the most streamed song on Spotify of 2024 with 1.6 billion streams. (If you want to read more about her read this!)
Willy Wonka-Themed Event Takes Over Scotland
‘Willy’s Chocolate Expreience,’ newly launched website had various AI generated images of a candy-land with an ‘Enchanted Garden’ and “Chocolate fantasy,” when really all it had been was a dusty old warehouse serving up half-filled cups of lemonade and dull props. This was all for 35 euros in Glasgow, meaning hundreds of people had been ripped off. The one and only director of ‘Companies House’ Billy Coull was discovered, with him promising to give full refuns to all parents.
The Highly Anticipated 'Wicked' Movie Release
After travelling from theater to theater for over 20 years the Wicked film adaptation, directed by Crazy Rich Asians’ Jon M.Chu, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande took up our cinemas and all of socia media as they played the roles of Elpheba and Glinda respectively. Fans couldn’t stop singing hits from the musical like, ‘Defying Gravity.’ Soon it will grace the screens from our homes, with the sequel also being relesed in 2025 as ‘Wicked: For Good.’
Inside Out 2
As the highest grossing animated film of all time, Inside Out 2 skillfully captured a rollercoaster of emotions felt by Riley a teenager who is going through puberty, depicting relatable and touching experiences for the teen and adult population across the globe. It reached th $1 billion mark in just 19 days and recieved nominations at The Golden Globe, Annie and Critics’ Choice Movie Awards.
AI: Revolutionizing Technology and Art
January: Cerebes Systems with Mayo Clinic collaborted to train AI models to process and analyse complex medical information to improve the efficiency in the diagnosis and treatment process.
Feburary: Cisco launched it’s first context aware AI assistant for Panopicta which deals with security issues through understanding and investigation.
German copany, LAOIN also introduced BUD-E, an AI voice assistant with a similar concept to Siri and Alexa. This provides developers with the tools to create custom voice AI systems.
March: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security revealed its AI Roadmap strategy in adopting GenAI in national security, to target areas of threat detection, border security, and ethical AI practices.
April: A trial shocased that large language models (LLMs) could be utilised for tailored manipulation based on user data to create highly persuasive arguments. This raises ethical concerns for AI generated properganda and advertising.
Cognizant and Microsoft partnered, leveraging Microsoft Copilot, Cognizant’s advisory and digital transformation services to help operationalize generative AI.
May: Open AI released its GPT-4o version that can give responses to questions inputed via voice, image or text. The model gives more updated, safer and valuable responses.
June: Apple Intelligence was intergrated into iPhones and Siris by Apple. Siri became more capable of handling multi-step questions. iPhone introduced image generation and advanced language translation.
SAP announced generative AI innovations in partnership with multiple tech giants like Google, Meta and Microsoft. The SAP Saphire Confrence is planned to discuss improving customer value.
July: NATO modified its AI stratergy to increase its protection against misleading content being spread.
August: The US Department of Defence established Task Force Lima which is specialised in ensuring generative AI is ethically used.
Cerebas introduced a new AI inference service and claimed it to be the fastest globally.
Clemson University and the Medical University of South Carolina implemented the Clemson- In collaboration with SoundHound, MUSC Health implemented an AI assisant named Emily, to improve patient satisfaction.
SoundHound released Amelia, a leading platform in conversational AI .
September: Intuit introduced notable differences in it’s GenOS designed to provide personalised financial solutions for users.
October: Sir Dammis Hassabis and Dr. John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing AlphaFold. AlphaFold is an AI program that creates predictions for protein structures in 3D by analysing its amino acid sequence.
November: The highest auctioned AI art was sold by hyper-realistic AI robot Ai-da, selling a portrait of the mathematician Alan Turing for 1.3 million dollars.
December: Open AI had “12 days of Shipmas,” instigating new updates and features. This included new enhancements to SearchGPT and the release O3 model achieving a 96.7% accuracy on complex mathematical problems, with 71.7% accuracy on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark with improved coding skills and achieved an 87.5% score on the ARC-AGI benchmark tests, with it’s ability to tackle complex, human-related problem-solving tasks.
The Internet Sensation Hippo - Moo Deng
Moo Deng , whose name means ‘bouncy pork,’ is the most ridiculously famous pygmy hippo in the world. She lives in Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Si Racha, Chonburi, Thailand and became a popular internet meme at only 2 months of age. What makes Moo Deng so special I have no idea of. What makes a Frank Green better than any other bottle? Enthusiasam over her cuteness spread her name across Twitter and Instagram with some super fans even flying to Thailand to take photos with the hippo. Even Bowen Yang took to the screens to impersonate the pig on Saturday Night Live a contreversial comedic skit. Clips of her running around, sleeping and biting the zookeepers leg- it’s all online. In fact, she has her own livestream andd website! The Moo Deng phase seems to be going strong into 2025 so let’s see where it leads her…