At an event in San Francisco in November, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, was asked what surprises the field would bring in 2024. Online chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT will take “a leap forward that no one expected,” Mr. Altman immediately responded. Sitting beside him, James Manyika, a Google executive, nodded and said, “Plus one to that.” The A.I. industry this year is set to be defined by one main characteristic: a remarkably rapid improvement of the technology as advancements build upon one another, enabling A.I. to generate new kinds of media, mimic human reasoning in new ways and seep into the physical world through a new breed of robot. In the coming months, A.I.-powered image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney will instantly deliver videos as well as still images. And they will gradually merge with chatbots like ChatGPT.