If one event summed up 2023 for me it was surely the conviction for fraud of Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried, founder the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was for years the face of not only a tech bubble that had precious little to do with technology, but also the poster boy of Silicon Valley’s latest dopey wheeze, ‘effective altruism’, a vapid moral philosophy that amounts to little more than turbo-charged utilitarianism and, not coincidentally, gives the thumbs-up to hoarding vast piles of money. Bankman-Fried’s downfall rather neatly marks the end of an era, one that really came to a close with the 2022 and 2023 inflation spike and resultant rise in interest rates. And however painful the medicine of fiscal tightening has been, we can at least hope that the end of the free money era will also put an end to the worst excesses of cash-chasing that has seen unprofitable businesses blossom and, in the case of FTX, prepared the ground for outright fraud. Perhaps all that money sloshing around out there can now be redirected toward productive investment. Just a thought. So, if the biggest event was the deflating of a bubble, was there any actual technology on show in 2023? Well, there was some, yes. Without a doubt, the star of the show this year was artificial intelligence (AI). This year saw OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft mature into products including the deep embedding of AI technology into its Azure cloud service. In addition, Google, which had hitherto seen itself as something of a leader in the field, found itself on the backfoot, releasing Bard and Gemini to catch up. It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. A bizarre boardroom battle saw OpenAI boss Sam Altman fired and then rehired inside a week, with the company board then given the heave-ho in what looks increasingly like an internecine battle between the two wings of the AI religion: boosters and doomsters. It’s not all about software, though. 2023 was an interesting year for hardware, most notably silicon. Chipmakers Nvidia and Broadcom saw their share prices soar due to the aforementioned AI boom. After all, those large language models have to run on something. Intel, which had been suffering, also began what looks very much like a recovery, not only seeking a slice of the AI action but also coming good on its plans to become the world’s leading chip fabricator. On top of all of that, Arm Holdings floated on the stock market, notably on New York’s Nasdaq market rather than its native London Stock Exchange. Virtual and artificial reality also matured with Apple Vision Pro being announced. Still, despite joining Meta’s Oculus on the market, VR and AR remain perennial ‘next-big-things’, and it is hard to quiet the suspicion that they are solutions in search of a problem. Social media has not been quiet in 2023 either. Then again, it never is. Elon Musk’s Twitter, now re-christened X, continues to circle the drain while US authorities have zeroed in on TikTok as a threat not only to its youthful userbase, but even to national security. Threads, Facebook’s bland alternative to Twitter, also launched, though why anyone would copy the unsuccessful Twitter – barely profitable even before Musk bought it – remains an open question. So that was 2023. What comes next for technology is as unclear as ever, but the bloodletting in the form of mass layoffs seems to have come to an end at least. Let’s hope that the changed macroeconomic environment will put the focus on useful technologies rather than on imaginary money and websites that allow people to drive themselves insane arguing. Still, December saw a major stock market recovery due to investors expecting interest rates to fall again, so perhaps not. Read More: Blog Blogs Jason Walsh
2023: a year of flux in technology
