Tech Report '22'
From a crypto crash to the outbreak of a chip war, the year’s rumbles will be heard for a long time.
The world of technology went through its internal skirmishes, and, sometimes, outright war. Here are the Top 5 Tech news of the year -
• Happenings of 2022, in ascending order:
Fifth is the Crypto Crash:
Bitcoin and cryptos seem to collapse a few times every year, but this one seems different. It was 'A Lehman moment' for the sector.
The total market capitalization crashed from $3 trillion in November 2021 to below $1 trillion.
The implosion of "stablecoins"- Terra and Luna set this avalanche off, and everything culminated with the disgraceful tumble of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.There are some stalwarts still standing, like Coinbase and Binance, but the question here is - will there be a bounce, or is another crash or an Extinction Event awaiting in the future?
Crypto will be resurrected, but in some different form soon, but for that, the industry needs to stop fighting its internal battles and mature with regulation and an ethical way of operating.
Fourth is the tech person who features in every single annual roundup of tech, Elon Musk, this time for his much-ballyhooed takeover of Twitter:
Enough has been written about this melee by many people, many times ironically on Twitter itself. Musk won the war to acquire the social network, but it will prove harder to win the peace.
Social media seems to have painted itself into a corner, with Mark Zuckerberg engrossing himself in the metaverse and neglecting a sliding Facebook. Meanwhile, Musk and Twitter seem to be spoiling for a fight with Tim Cook and Apple, a brawl that could completely reshape tech platforms.
The third is the Cambrian explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs) or generative models in AI:
Open AI’s GPT3, fed on 175 billion machine learning parameters released in mid-2020, wowed the world with its writing capabilities.
GPT4, conceivably with more than 100 trillion parameters, will be another quantum leap.
But between the two versions has been a profusion of LLMs—like Open AI’s DALL-E and Google’s Imagen constructing brilliant images, Stable Diffusion open-sourcing LLMs, Jasper for marketing, and now Meta’s Cicero which ‘solves’ diplomacy! This is the most exciting development in AI and possibly in all the technological sectors, as pundits proclaim this to be a pathway towards Artificial General Intelligence and Singularity.
For evidence, check out the excitement around Chat GPT, the latest evolution of GPT, released just a few days back.
Second is the tech sector crash:
As tech companies arose from their post-covid riches, they were hit by global economic decelerations, customer behaviour shifts, inflation, and the Ukraine war.
Big Tech lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and companies across the board laid off thousands.
The exact thing occurred in China, but for a different reason: Xi Jinping’s pursuit of Communist Party supremacy and his vision of “common prosperity” have throttled the endeavors of its tech sector.
The party has waged war on Chinese Big Tech and succeeded decisively. This will have a major global consequence in the years to come.
Finally, the top of the list, as this will shape geopolitics for years to come, is the outbreak of a chip war:
The US and China are engaged in an all-out war in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence. It started in Donald Trump’s era, but Joe Biden has seriously upped the ante.
Companies across the world cannot ship essential chip-making equipment to China; US nationals and even green card holders can’t work with Chinese companies. Apart from that, there are a series of embargoes on China’s chip, 5G, and component manufacturers.
China is virtually being cut off from semiconductor supply chains, a move that jeopardizes its technological advancement.
No one expects China to take this lying down; we will see massive Chinese local investments, diplomatic muscle flexing, and maybe an all-out war with Taiwan- the world’s most significant chip manufacturer.
This year has served up other big moments in tech—a possible cure for Alzheimer’s, Microsoft’s fierce pursuit of gaming supremacy, and significant breakthroughs in climate-friendly tech. Although it has been a bruising year, I anticipate this trend to continue in 2023.
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