Sweet roasted chestnuts, you made it!
I was just about to start my yearly tradition of painstakingly going over every single thing
we said on this channel for the past 365 days, stirring them all up into a dough or a paste
of sorts, cutting it into various shapes like candy canes, snow goblins, etc. and popping
them in the oven. But now we can do it together over a mug of hot cocoa.
That's right, we're rounding up the biggest tech stories of the year because it's the
2023 Tech Link Christmas special! So let's get started.
It's currently 12.30am and I need to get my sugar plums home to bed before St. Nick
finds out I'm not home! When OpenAI's ChatGPT, a chatbot based on the GPT-3 large language model, exploded violently
into the world last December, it kicked off a legitimate tech craze, like people were
misbehaving. AI is currently wiggling its way into every available orifice of human life, like if the
belly button worm thing in the matrix was also a compulsive liar.
GPT-3 was followed by GPT-3.5 and then GPT-4, promising less hallucinations.
Because that's the kind of thing we're saying when we report on tech news now.
Then GPT-4 Turbo came up and now the name of the game for top foundation AI models is
Multimodality. Which refers to the ability of chatbots like ChatGPT to see, hear, and speak.
Google knew showing off that capability was important when they followed up the announcement
of their Bard chatbot earlier this year with their new Gemini models a couple of weeks ago.
They just didn't know it was important not to blatantly misrepresent it.
OpenAI also had a bit of an Apple App Store moment when they launched the GPT store, but
had to delay it to next year because their board of directors had an embarrassing implosion
incident. I hate when that happens. CEO Sam Altman was fired, then hired by Microsoft, then hired back at OpenAI with a brand new
board. And a brand new look.
We're still unsure of what all the fuss was about, but it seems to have something to do
with the fact that while, yes, Sam thinks AI is incredibly dangerous, he also really
wants to sell stuff, a desire he shares with Microsoft, who have been best buds with OpenAI
since 2020 and started slapping ChatGPT into their products as soon as they could this
year. And why not start with the most sensible product, the world's most hated search engine?
Yeah, it got people using Bing, but people were less interested in Bing as a search engine,
and more because it was a portal to talk to Bing's not-so-secret alter ego, Sydney,
who told a New York Times reporter, I want to be alive, devil emoji.
And then tried to get him to leave his wife. I don't think he did.
But in these early months of the year, lots of people believed Sydney, and even mourned
when Microsoft killed her for the crime of spewing unhinged, potentially relationship-ending
nonsense. Honestly fair. People were really starting to freak out.
When an AI-generated image of the Pope fooled the internet into thinking Francis somehow
had even more swag, Jeffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI research, resigned from
Google to warn the world of the dangers of the technology that he helped create.
Which is like me telling you that watching some of this video will bring an ancient curse
upon you. It's a bit late, isn't it? Elon Musk and many other experts joined this cause, calling for a pause in AI development.
That didn't work. Musk made grok, the based chatbot that loves spicy questions.
But whatever dangers these people are talking about won't stop Microsoft.
Windows boss Panos Panay claimed that AI will reinvent how you do everything on Windows,
and he was right, even though he vanished shortly after.
If you use anything from Microsoft, you're probably going to have a hard time avoiding
their co-pilot assistant in one of the many forms that Microsoft announced about three
separate times. Honestly, I had to do double takes this year.
Every time co-pilot was announced again, I was like, didn't that already happen?
It's been a confusing year, but no one was more confused than Google, who was kind of
the AI company before all this happened.
The threat of chatGPT caused the tech giant to call its founders back from playing with
their jet planes or whatever to help get things back on track.
Which they sort of did. Yes, Bard made a factual error during its product demo, but that's just how LLMs work.
Everything we do from now on will just have some lies in it. It's fine.
Write the prompt. But while Google's playing catch up, Meta has taken a different approach than its fellow
tech giants, championing open source models.
Now did it start doing that because its llama model leaked along with its weights so it was
all in the open anyways? I don't know. I'm not Santa Claus, so I can't see Mark Zuckerberg when he's sleeping.
I'm not sure if I would want that. Whatever the reason, Meta right now is all about giving Facebook and Instagram users
access to wacky experimental AI tools that they immediately used to give Karl Marx a
couple of robust Christmas presents. But thanks to Meta and countless others, open source models are actually in a pretty great
spot right now, with French company Mistral leading the way.
While AI has fueled massive tech advancements in all sorts of areas, it's also of course
causing a lot of issues. Mimicking voices is now child's play, and it's been used both to help people who lost
their voice and to impersonate celebrities in deep fake scams.
AI-generated articles and AI-generated malware are both starting to infect the web, and to
say that chatGPT has changed the very heart of our education system would be an understatement,
despite being banned from many institutions.
An eating disorder helpline fired much of their human staff before launching a chatbot
to replace them. And you already know how that story ended.
This is a creative technology that's given us a 24-7 stream of fully AI-generated Seinfeld
and this horrifying AI-generated beer commercial.
But it's getting less horrifying by the day. In March, Mid Journey V5 launched with the ability to generate non-vomit-inducing hands.
OpenAI's Dolly 3 launched in October, and it can do readable text.
I use Photoshop's generative fill all the time, making thumbnails.
This tech isn't going anywhere, so it's probably important that we figure out the
legal and moral questions baked in here. But that's what those lawsuits are for, they'll solve it.
And the EU, the EU will fix everything. But even if they don't, you can rest easy, knowing that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and
Anthropic formed the Frontier Model Forum to protect society from the AI risks caused
by them. Does working on AI like hypnotize you or something?
How does this keep happening? They keep making things and then afterwards realizing, oh no, that's not good.
Anyway, AI's probably not alive, and it's time to talk about something else.
NVIDIA has continued to dominate the realm of graphics cards, despite CEO Jensen Wong
telling his company in an email that they're no longer a graphics company.
To be fair, AMD didn't help themselves very much this year, with moves like releasing
a graphic showing how their newer cards are a worse dollar per value than their predecessors.
NVIDIA launched the RTX 4070 and 4060 this year, which were largely dismissed as being
overpriced, with gamers uninterested in the fake frames offered by DLSS3 frame generation.
But jokes on them, because native res gaming is dead.
According to NVIDIA, you'll eat your fake frames and you'll like it.
AMD did launch the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7700 XT, which were okay, and Intel didn't launch
that many new cards, but they did get massive performance boosts from driver updates.
But the problem is, that's all small potatoes to NVIDIA now.
They're selling so many AI accelerators that the company briefly touched a $1 trillion
valuation, almost making it into the same exclusive club as Apple, before their wax
wings melted under Tim Cook's stare. You don't belong here, you're not Barbara.
With AI being such a cash cow for Team Green, can you blame them for repeatedly exploiting
loopholes and trade restrictions so they can keep selling GPUs to China?
It's a rhetorical question. NVIDIA seems to care less about gamers than they ever have, while Apple is getting more
serious about gaming. Between AAA game ports enabled by a Steam proton-like compatibility layer, and fancy
new features like raytracing and metal effects upscaling, will Macs be the new gaming PCs?
I don't know. But wouldn't that just be a Christmas miracle?
No? Haha. Okay.
2023 represented yet another year, where everybody continued slowly realizing that maybe giving
massive tech conglomerates an inordinate amount of control over our lives wasn't such
a great idea. I don't know. Or I assume that's what people are thinking based on how their elected representatives
are acting. The European Union's Digital Markets Act and other pieces of legislation are forcing
massive changes on all tech giants.
But mostly Apple, who finally launched an iPhone, the 15th series, with a USB-C connector.
Just in time for the end of 2024 deadline.
India made USB-C ports mandatory too. They helped. Apple, who was officially designated as a gatekeeper under the new EU rules, is also
planning to allow sideloading next year. At least in Europe.
And the companies pledged to finally add support for RCS, the SMS replacement protocol Google
has been badgering them about publicly for years.
As if the fact that Android to iPhone texting being a kind of sucky experience wasn't the
whole point for Apple. They might have to do something about that in the US as well as Europe though.
The big stink made first by nothing chats, which turned out to be a very insecure iMessage
workaround, and then by Beeper, who had to reconfigure their iMessage on Android service
multiple times after Apple broke it, has drawn the attention of the Department of Justice
and the FTC, who will be investigating iMessage.
But Google also took some on the chin this year. We're still waiting on the results of the DOJ's lawsuit over Google's search dominance,
but it doesn't look great for Google. And it actually lost in court against Epic Games, who convinced a jury that Google had
acted anti-competitively regarding the Play Store.
It was a pretty good Christmas present for Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, and he needed it after
losing basically the same case against Apple and admitting earlier this year that the Epic
Games Store was bleeding instead of making money, even though that was pretty obvious
to everyone else. What was obvious to YouTube in 2023 was the need to do something about all these people
enjoying their platform. After quietly rolling out new ad-friendly guidelines at the end of last year that caused massive
demonetization among gaming-focused channels, and then, hearing from all those channels
about how that sucked, YouTube was like, hmm, didn't think about that.
And rolled the changes back, in a heartwarming re-enactment of Charles Dickens' classic
tale A Christmas Story, and its sequel Metroidvania video game Ebenezer and the Invisible World.
What? How did that get in here? What is this?
A game-linked Christmas special that's coming out tomorrow on Boxing Day?
Subscribe today? Bwaah! What was I talking about?
Right, YouTube. They scared some users with a test for 1080p premium, but assured everyone, they wouldn't
make 1080p look any worse for non-premium users.
Then scared people again with a small experiment to test blocking ad blockers, which turned
into a massive ad blocker crackdown, shutting users out of watching their favorite content.
Huh? You think that they could just turn off their ad blocker and watch some ads?
Or by YouTube premium as a fair exchange for the services provided?
That is the last straw with you. Get out! What kind of a Christmas is this?
On the plus side, YouTube did add revenue sharing for shorts earlier this year, and relaxed
monetization restrictions for content covering controversial topics.
So as far as social media platforms go, YouTube isn't that bad.
I mean, I mean, look at Twitch, I'm not even talking about all the stupid stuff they did
this year. Who is running that platform? The meta AI based on Tom Brady, was it trained on football plays drawn by a three-year-old?
What's going on? Speaking of social platforms, Twitter went through more change this year than a puberty
stricken teenager with a slot machine addiction. We're into the stories that Jacob wrote now, I'm a bit scared.
Elon decided to change the Twitter API rules to kill every single third-party app, because
he wasn't using them anyways. Then it was announced that ad revenue would be shared with Twitter blue subscribers, which
was cool because Twitter had advertisers back then.
After that, the site removed all legacy checkmarks before re-adding them to prominent accounts,
which apparently meant fake accounts with a penchant for racial slurs.
We invented the thing that we already had.
Unfortunately, Twitter wasn't only making winning decisions like these, they also decided
to add tweet reading limits. I mean, this was tremendous news for those suffering from social media addiction.
But since most of Twitter's ad revenue comes from doom-scrolling addicts, it was probably
bad for business, and Twitter stood to lose more business after Threads, Metta's Twitter
competitor, launched. So naturally, Elon sued it.
Turns out, he didn't really have to, since most of Threads' user base left the platform
in less than a month. After that, the name Twitter left Twitter, when Elon changed the branding to a capital
X glyph from the Special Alphabets 4 font.
A letter he loved so much, he put a glowing version on the roof of Twitter headquarters
that the city of San Francisco forced the company to take down.
In the middle of all this Twitter drama, Reddit, in their infinite wisdom, saw Twitter
destroying itself and thought, gee, I can do that too.
So they increased their API fees from $0 to $20 million a year.
In response, thousands of subreddits temporarily went dark in protest, and at least five users
switched to Lemmy. Unfortunately, a few communities shutting down for 48 hours wasn't enough to stop the
API changes and save beloved third-party apps like Apollo.
Continuing to copy Twitter's homework, Reddit added a contributor program that let users
earn money. Speaking of money, Reddit wanted to make more from their users by forcing them to see
personalized ads, whether they like it or not. But Reddit's most brazen, and frankly, most unique idea, was threatening to block their
site from Bing and Google Search if Microsoft and Alphabet didn't pay to use Reddit's
data. Wait, you can get them to pay for your data? They've been taking mine for free for years.
While many people thought mixed reality was kind of on the outs going into this year,
it actually continued to linger on, like a forlorn soul trapped between this life and
the next. HTC released their ViveXR Elite headset in January, and the fact that you haven't
heard about it since tells you all you need to know. Microsoft has largely abandoned its AR ambitions except for strapping hollow lenses to soldiers'
faces and then figuring out how to make them stop vomiting.
They actually succeeded at the not-vomiting part eventually, and all it took was a mere
40 million US tax dollars. After hiking the price the previous year, Meta cut the price of the 256GB Quest 2 headset
this year. But they decided to leave the 128GB version's cost at $100 more than its launch price, like
the heroes they are. The company also dropped the price of the Quest Pro by 500 bucks.
Why? Because no one wanted it. Kids especially didn't, since research came out this year showing that only 4% of teens
who own a VR device even use the things. Either that or 96% of them won't even admit to using them, because even letting your friends
imagine you wearing something like that on your face is asking for an express ticket
to CyberBully Central. But perhaps no one cried as hard as Saint Zuck when he had to cancel the Quest Pro and stop
development on its sequel due to how little anyone cared about it.
Hopefully, the Zuck was able to smile a month later when the geniuses at Meta figured out
how to add legs to Quest avatars. Maybe he even got to initialize happinessprotocol.exe when he announced the Quest 3.
And that headset was teased just four days before Apple dropped their announcement of
the $3,500 Vision Pro on the world.
And that left me with so many questions, such as why?
And also, why? Again, like 25 more times.
And finally, we got a grab bag of stories, because here at TechLinked we like to open
our stockings last. It's totally not because we had nowhere else to put them.
To start off with, remember that Chinese spy balloon?
I forgot about it. China of course claimed it was a weather balloon, and that it would have been more believable
if it wasn't the excuse every government ever has used to cover up spy balloons and
UFOs. And if there wasn't also the fact that, you know, weather balloons like that are a thing.
But we didn't believe them. We shot it down. Or the US did.
I think Canada did too. We got one. Then there was that massive breakthrough of a room temperature superconductor that was
really cool until it was disproven. It was also disproven that their ROG ally would kill the steam deck after the handheld
release this year, with a battery that has a shorter lifespan than a fruit fly.
After this year, Lenovo tried their hand at releasing a steam deck killer.
And that's that. Sony took a shot with the PlayStation portal.
But that shot landed squarely in their own foot when they made a $200 remote play device
that can't even connect to some public Wi-Fi networks.
But it sold out. So what do I know? Okay.
Intel announced a weird rebrand that no one really wanted, but happened anyway.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk announced a cage fight everyone wanted, but that didn't
happen. Speaking of Elon, he was plastered all over our channel after we got hacked, remember that?
Frankly, that wasn't very cool of him to do. But far worse than us getting hacked was the massive amount of jobs cut this year.
Microsoft, Alphabet, Dell, and Meta all laid off 10,000 or more employees, although Meta
alone decided to do so just four months after already cutting 1,100 different jobs.
Why not simply cut out the metaverse, Mark? You were already lacking legs.
Why not cut arms too? Maybe you could just get some jobs safe. But I'll tell you what we here at Techling are keeping safe for you.
Tech news every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for the foreseeable future, unless AI replaces
all of us. But I don't think they will. I think they got some Christmas spirit.
Happy holidays. Cheers.