Translator: Jing Yan.
2023 is an exciting year for the technology industry, especially as AI promises to be a game-changer across multiple industries.
Now that 2023 is over, it's time to take stock of what works (good), what doesn't (bad), and what is downright ugly, and adjust your future plans and expectations in time.
Here's an overview of some of the good, bad, and ugly things in the tech space in 2023 from Spiceworks News & Insights.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most iconic technological breakthrough of 2023, although the products that led to its widespread adoption and praise and sparked ongoing regulatory discussions were released back in November 2019.
However, to date, only a handful of companies have truly mastered large language models (LLMs), and even fewer are as advanced as GPT-4. Still, API-based LLM access unlocks the potential for technological innovation and application in real-world scenarios.
In addition, the advent of multimodality in generative AI should open up many use cases that were never envisioned. Multimodal generative AI is the ability to deliver multi-sensory immersive experiences by accepting inputs and generating outputs of multiple data types such as text, images, audio, depth, inertia, etc.
It is important to note that multimodal generative AI, while promising, has a limited scope for development as it requires more relevant training data.
After years of hiatus, Apple finally announced its foray into immersive technology in 2023 and impressed attendees with the first Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2023 in June. Despite the hefty $3,499, the new device's M2 chip and spatial computing capabilities make it a good value for money.
According to reports, the Apple Vision Pro is expected to be available in 2024 due to production delays. Right now, only the Apple Car and its generative AI development work remains "under wraps".
A few months later, in September, Meta released the Meta Quest 3, powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip. Meta's third-generation AR VR device has received positive feedback, especially considering that its $500** is significantly competitive with the $1,000 Quest Pro and $3,499 Apple Vision Pro.
The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was developed in partnership with HPE to once again become one of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers and break the limit of exascales.
The $600 million Frontier supercomputer is the first exascale system, which means it can perform exascale (1,018) floating-point operations per second. It is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235A architecture and has approximately 9,402 nodes, including 50,000 processors (including AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz), a custom AMD Radeon Instinct 250X accelerator, a total of 8,699,904 cores for GPUs and CPUs, Slingshot-11 interconnects, and a footprint roughly equivalent to two tennis courts.
The data processing power of the Frontier system is expected to come in handy in upcoming compute-intensive technological innovations in areas such as biology (cancer research), pharmacology, meteorology (natural disasters**, climate change), designing energy-efficient engines, particle accelerators and modular nuclear reactors, and studying the origins of the universe (dark energy and dark matter).
Every year, hundreds of new devices flood the consumer electronics market, but there are only a handful of truly memorable gadgets. The following hardware and equipment stand out in 2023, most of which were launched in the second half of 2023::
Smartphones: Google Pixel 8 Pro and Apple iPhone 15 Pro – both tech giants have successfully launched their respective products this year.
Laptops: 15-inch MacBook Air and Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2 — the former managed to salvage MacBook sales that had been declining for years, while the latter received a less-than-ideal but positive response from critics.
Consumer-grade chips: Intel has introduced the Core i9-14900K, as well as the more cost-effective Core i7-14700K that can compete with Apple's M2 Ultra chip.
Smart home devices: Amazon's Echo Hub is compatible with 140,000 smart devices via the Matter and Thread standards, which is a big winner in itself. In addition, it adds an infrared sensor, a home map view function, and centralized control capabilities.
Smart Glasses: With the launch of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, Meta has successfully clarified the criticism it has received for Ray-Ban Stories.
In December 2023, with the support of scientists from Quera Computing, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the University of Maryland, nearly 24 researchers from Harvard University made a major breakthrough and ushered in the era of quantum computing.
Through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ) project, the research team developed the first quantum circuit by developing the "noise" physics Rydberg qubit array technology to create error-correcting logic qubits. Logical qubits are the key to fault-tolerant computation in quantum technology. In contrast to error-prone physical qubits, logical qubits can maintain their quantum state through error correction, which allows them to be used to solve a variety of complex problems.
LK-99, the material that was once thought to be a room-temperature superconductor, turned out to be just a "squib". The material is said to exhibit non-destructive currents at 127 (260) and ambient pressure without the need for coolant, and research on this material went viral on social ** in July.
The potential benefits of lossless electricity include an efficient power grid, faster digital interconnection of computer systems, not to mention economic magnets for building faster trains, particle accelerators, MRIs, and even fusion reactors.
Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim and their team at the South Korean start-up Center for Quantum Energy Research have come up with this claim, which is unusual considering that the maximum superconducting temperature under ambient pressure is close to -138-23.
It was later confirmed that the copper sulfide impurities of LK-99 caused a partial suspension of the material, allowing the researchers to obtain superconductivity. At the moment, most scientists who study superconductivity do not see much reason to continue working on LK-99.
Recently, due to a patent dispute filed by medical device manufacturer Masimo with the International Commission (ITC), Apple will delay the sale of its two latest smartwatches, the Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2, from December 21. Apple will reportedly preemptively halt sales a week before Christmas to comply with the import ban enacted by the ITC in October.
In two cases, Masimo accused Apple of infringing 10 patents, including a blood oxygen sensor (SPO2). The iPhone maker entered into a partnership with Masimo in 2013 and may now be looking to partner with or acquire the company. But according to Masimo, Apple poached Michael O'Reilly, the current head of its Health Special Projects, as well as several other employees, including engineers.
Apple did not say what percentage of its $39.8 billion in revenue from wearables, home and accessories is sales of smartwatches. However, Apple stopped selling at 3 p.m. ET on December 21, which could seriously impact its holiday sales performance. But the only benefit for Apple could be to evade third-party retailers and ** scrutiny on the matter, as the deadline for review is Christmas Eve.
The incident could be a wake-up call for smaller tech companies to rethink: Is it a smart move to partner with Apple or other big tech companies?
It's the only technology that makes it to the red and black list at the same time. Generative AI technology isn't bad in itself, but developers are too sloppy in their implementation and desperate for the use of proprietary or publicly available data, which has undoubtedly raised concerns among regulators, responsible AI development proponents, and others.
To date, lax or non-existent AI regulations have spawned data privacy concerns, harmful content, web data scraping, copyright infringement issues, opaque development standards, AI bias, lack of accountability, and other worrying topics.
The European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act is the world's first AI regulation to be passed, aiming to address some or all of these issues. But even then, it is not expected to come into force until 2025, which means that current development is not expected to be restricted. Admittedly, this is the secret to innovation and other things thriving.
Recently, there has been a "big **" in the AI industry As the developer of the chatbot ChatGPT, OpenAI is undoubtedly one of the most concerned artificial intelligence companies. It was Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of this company who was known as the "father of ChatGPT", who experienced a dramatic reversal of being dismissed by lightning in the "crazy 5 days", joining Microsoft, and finally reinstating.
According to a statement released by OpenAI's board of directors, the reason for the dismissal of Altman was that he lacked honesty in his communication with the board of directors, which hindered the board's ability to perform its duties.
To OpenAI's surprise, more than 700 of OpenAI's 770 employees signed a joint letter demanding that Ultraman be reinstated and that the board of directors** resign with Ultraman.
Two days after his dismissal, CEO Nadella, Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI and owns 49 percent of its shares, announced that Altman would join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. The news of Altman's addition sent Microsoft's market value skyrocketing by $56 billion.
Reddit changed its API pricing policy in April 2023, which means that third-party apps must pay to access Reddit's data, which is free until July 1, 2023. The move was tantamount to sounding the death knell for several third-party developers, including Apollo, which closed on June 30.
Apollo managed to win support for free data access and oppose Reddit's new policy, but the company's leadership remained adamant, making the situation worse. At one point, more than 8,200 sub-forums and tens of thousands of moderators pledged to go private, with Reddit's new API policy, causing massive disruption.
What's more, Reddit's treatment of these moderators has eroded community trust, causing a large number of knowledge users to leave the platform.
The result is to force multiple third-party developers to charge users a subscription fee to access Reddit. For example, Narwhal for Reddit for iOS users costs $3 per month$99;Infinity for Reddit costs at least $2 per month$99 (this is the cheapest);Relay for Reddit costs $0 per month$99 to $4$99;Whereas Now for Reddit costs $3 per month$99;
Reddit's efforts to monetize its valuable data come after Company X under Elon Musk. Company X aims to open up another revenue stream by introducing an API pricing tier in March 2023. Apparently, the two companies want to stop helping AI companies to scrape and use free data for free to train large language models. Reddit even threatens to block Google and Bing's web search crawlers.
In fact, according to originalityAI's data, 30 out of the top 10004% blocked OpenAI's web crawler, GPTbot. Meanwhile, 16 out of the top 10005% blocked ccbot, 85% blocked google-extended, 24% shielded anthropico -ai.
In hindsight, Reddit wasn't wrong in identifying strategic options and taking action, but it could have handled it better.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion** to oppose the platform's censorship. He has since renamed it X in the name of promoting free speech, laid off most of his employees, and lifted bans on many accounts.
In early November, after Musk publicly embraced anti-Semitic conspiracy theories favored by white supremacists, a number of high-profile brands paused their advertising on X, including companies such as Disney, Paramount, NBCniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate and CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery Channel, as well as tech giants IBM and Apple.
At the DealBook conference held at the end of November, Musk went even further, lashing out at advertisers for leaving his platform because of the high antisemitism on X. He even singled out Disney's Bob Iger and said, "I'm not uncommon for them to advertise!."If anyone wants to blackmail me with advertising or money, then you get out. ”
The leader of the controversial X, Tesla, SpaceX and several other businesses claimed to be at war with **. In response, X sued the liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America, alleging that the group falsified its reports through fake account manipulation algorithms. Accordingly, Media Matters previously reported that "on Platform X, advertisers' posts are displayed right next to pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic content." ”
Finally, Musk said that the public will decide whether X will succeed in the long run, or whether the ad boycott will lead to the downfall of the social platform.