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Week 1

Januari 2023

LOOKING AHEAD

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2023, a partner newsletter to my blog post. The blog post goes into detail on my prediction that 2023 will be a battle of Infrastructure. It talks about why I think the Meta x Microsoft tag team has good odds heading into this fight. The items in this newsletter will focus on the predictions I promised at the end of my 2022 retrospective blog, and newsletter.
  • The Year That Will Be: ChatGPT and AI regulation, AI Ethics, The Chief Twit and the Mastodon in the Room, The War in Ukraine, The Return Of The King, and The Cutting Edge

CHATGPT AND AI REGULATION

There is a lot of regulation on the horizon, rather than go over the entire list, I thought it’d be good to cover the broad strokes instead. Our old laws and regulations were already hopelessly outdated, the processes behind them too slow and inefficient. Some researchers are predicting that the yet to be released GPT-4 might be capable of passing the Bar Exam. I predict that this will happen, and that AI, supervised by certified and experienced lawyers, will be able to greatly streamline policy making and administrative tasks. In doing so, it will be easier to satisfy the increasing ‘data hunger’ of both citizens and regulators alike, grant better insight into complex legal processes, make better policies in general, and to track more reliably the so called ‘paper trails’ of goods and services both domestically and abroad.

AI ETHICS

As AI experienced explosive growth over the course of 2022, more and more light began to be shed on previously barely discussed weak points in the open-source model of software development, and the upon the murky ethical situation of scraping publicly accessible portfolios of creators, as well as larger repositories of User Generated Content (UGC). GitHub copilot is celebrated as one of the big breakthrough success stories of AI in practical use, and I don’t expect the court case against its alleged code piracy to be resolved in 2023. I predict that there will be more and more moral pressure upon the developers of algorithms though. This pressure will revolve around making easily verifiable where they get their data from, how they train their models, and who will ultimately make money from the output.

THE CHIEF TWIT AND THE MASTODON IN THE ROOM

Some background info on Twitter. Since its launch, Twitter has had 19 different funding rounds and raised $4.4 billion (before the buyout). It has lost $861 million dollars so far, counting both its time before and after registration on the stock market. Of the 33 earnings calls Twitter has had, it has announced profits on 14 of them. Now for some more recent info. The vast majority of Twitter users who said they’d quit Twitter after Elon Musk’s Takeover, haven’t, why? The same reason why it was still around to be bought by Elon in the first place, in spite of its dramatic financial performance up until that point. There is no alternative to Twitter, plain and simple. The Mastodon (elephant) in the room is that alternatives are too niche, too hard to use, frequently both. I predict that over the course of 2023, Elon will be forced to face reality by his investors and stabilise Twitter, at least to the point where some other company can get into a fight with regulators to purchase it. Rivals will also need time to capitalise on the opening presented to them, especially when refusing VC funding.

THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Sadly, I do not predict the war in Ukraine to end in 2023, what I do predict is that Ukraine will repel another major offensive via Belarus this year. I predict that this offensive will fail due to sabotage by resistance groups, combined Ukrainian precision bombardment of critical supply hubs and bases. The why and how of that are why this is relevant to cover in a tech newsletter such as mine. Ukraine has been able to resist and even push back against Russia because of the incredible tech savviness and adaptability of its armed forces. A recent high-profile strike against a Russian base, for example, is believed to have combined cyber warfare techniques such as cell phone tracing with the American provided HIMARS high mobility rocket system.

THE RETURN OF THE KING

If I had a dollar for every time an old legend returned to lead his followers into the dark and tumultuous future recently, I might almost be able to afford a cup of Starbucks coffee. I predict it’ll keep happening over the course of 2023. The biggest shock of 2022 was the return of Bob Iger to Disney, then came Chris Metzen’s return to Blizzard. And there’s rumours swirling of Jeff Bezos returning to the helm of Amazon. This is a pattern that I predict will continue as 2023 radically shakes up the status quo and investors in particular will require all the reassurance they can get. We’re going to see a lot of old faces pick up where they left off and fight to re-establish their ailing companies’ old dominance in the new tech world that’s emerging.

THE CUTTING EDGE

More Geopolitics, who would have thought? In the 2023 continuation of the Chip war, I predict that the US will continue its attempts to stifle Chinese development of experimental technologies such as AI and quantum computing. To do this, I predict it to apply more pressure to allies such as the Netherlands and Taiwan, as well as to companies such as Nvidia. I expect that over the course of 2023 we’ll begin to see some hints about the viability of China’s counterplay. I expect this to revolve around Chinese efforts to setup mature chip manufacture at scale, in contrast to the US’s focus on cutting edge chips. Mature chips are actually what most tech in the world runs on. If China succeeds, it will be able to ‘sweep the legs’ of the US, turning Taiwan into a liability instead of an asset. The logic would be that if China is denied cutting-edge chips anyway, it might as well destroy TSMC, Taiwan’s real shield against China. If China destroys TSMC, the US will not only lose its cutting-edge chip advantage, it’ll also lose its key source of mature chips. To be clear, this is more on a time scale of roughly 7 years, I don’t expect a 2023 invasion of Taiwan, but I definitely expect major escalation of production and investment efforts into chip manufacture from both sides.

NYT Predictions LINK
Gaming Accessibility LINK
Steam Deck Discovery LINK
Remote Work Wars LINK
CES Highlights LINK
Axios Predictions LINK
Sound of Silence LINK
Platformer Predictions LINK
Img2Img Animation LINK
Court Case Search LINK
Cozy Games LINK
The Code LINK
Fast Company Predictions LINK
Matter of Size LINK
Boss AI LINK
Zebra Crossing LINK 


ONE MORE THING...
Thanks for your patience! Writing a blog post and a newsletter in the same week is tough, I’ll need a bit more practice before I get that down haha. I’m really excited for this year though! Since its it’s kind of hard to get articles from the future, I decided to include some 2023 predictions in the first cup of serendipity of the year from other sources! You can cross reference my predictions with theirs, and then look back at the end of 2023 to check who ended up having egg on their face, and who ended up being right. There’s also the usual serendipity content, the cool bits and bobs I came across around the web. And then there’s some housekeeping I need to do. I’ll be taking some courses here and there to improve and grow. As a result of one such course I will not be publishing the newsletter on Thursday January 12th, Thursday January 26th, or on Thursday February 9th. The newsletters will instead be published on the Fridays of those respective weeks (so the 13th, 27th, and 10th). Those newsletters will all have my customary 3 images again, I opted to go for the one image this time because I really wanted the focus to be on the text, on the predictions in this start of the year special. That’s also why there was no ‘LINK’ at the end of these items. The links within the items are the necessary background info, but this time the newsletters are about my own predictions, so there’d be little point in having a main external link to direct you to. Thanks again for reading my content, happy new year and I look forward to writing for you!
 
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