This Year in Tech - under the hood
Despite mass layoffs, the engine of progress roared (hummed?! Wtf sound does an EV do?)
Felt like we were heading towards a cliff, however, I’m bloody excited for what lies ahead:
DeepMind launched Alphafold2
Can predict protein folds with 95% accuracy, saving months/years in new pharma research.
Generative AI went mainstream -
Text to image (DALL-E)
Text To Video - Synthesis
Language Models - GPT3, then ChatGPT already being used for debugging code, building marketing plans and interview prep.
Fusion
Finally, ‘20 years away’ for the last 50 years, happened this year!
For the 1st time, a reaction generated more energy than it consumed. This could enable:
Clean energy
Energy stability (reduce scarcity)
Better health outcomes for society due to reduced pollution
However, we are now ‘20 years away from commercialization”
The James Webb Space Telescope
In July, NASA's telescope gave us the oldest-ever (13.1B years old) image of the universe.
It will study the earliest stars and galaxies, & help us understand the universe's beginning & find planets that can host life.
The Great Consolidation
Adobe acquired Figma
Elon acquired Twitter
Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard and became the 3rd largest gaming company
Broadcom acquired VMWare
Oracle acquired Cerner
The Great Tech Crunch
After 10 years of unprecedented growth, the tech industry is going through a slowdown
1k+ companies in the US have laid of 150K+ employees
Meta: 11k
Amazon: 10k
Twitter: 5K
Stripe, Coinbase, & Microsoft: 1-2K employees each.