2023 Industry Lookback

The Rise of AI & The Decent of Madness  ....nah, madness remains.

Lets talk about the 3 buzzword technologies that we've primarily worked on in 2023.

1) XR (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, Extended Reality, All the damn realities)

Its super cool, looks cool, feels cool, but its hard to get right. It takes a lot of work to get right for professional use cases, and for entertainment use cases we can get to usefulness or 80% pretty quickly. Lots have said this is dead, those people are uneducated and informed. Instead consider it takes a long time to make something great, and this will continue to evolve, and will become reliant on AI to help solve the challenge of having enough content. We're very strong on this medium, and we believe how we experience data, entertainment, and productivity will continue to evolve to XR interfaces.

2) AI (Artificial Intelligence)

We'll expand upon this below so we'll keep it brief. This is the next new feature that everyone will demand exists in their everyday workflows. This was the year of discovery and experimentation. We made some really funny but often times useless things this year but next year is where the real work begins.

3) Blockchain/NFTs (uggh)

Truly a valid & important technology that will continue to exist, but unfortunately if you hear the words crypto, we're with you in saying just stop listening and walk away. The bad actors such as SBF/FTX, Celsius, Voyager, and the many others that were stupid and or greedy sadly destroyed the reach & potential of this technology. When these kinds of situations happen, you'll see a technology disappear from media and public discourse. However you will find the blockchain utilized without being highlighted in the various new softwares you'll use in the years ahead. The good actors focused on functionality and value will continue to build useful and meaningful technologies such as smart contracts. If you'e wondering do I need to use blockchain or web3, it's likely for security and digital ownership focused use cases. Eventually this will be a feature like copy paste, we don't need to talk about it, we don't need to ever hear "just trust me bro", just let us know your thoughts and it could become part of a solution.

Something majorly different happened this year!

I think its safe to say this year, the technology industry and everyone in the world that relies on it, has had AI at the very top of their minds.

Everyone has been experimenting, playing, testing with it, and you are seeing legit startups as well as tiktok influencers self proclaiming their app or their knowledge will change your world. We are 100% in the gartner hype cycle.

However, unlike other times where new technologies seem to come and pass like 3D TVs, or stall like VR or AR which all required a lot of time to build good use cases, AI is different. Think along the lines of internet, e-commerce and smartphone level of impact and growth.

The velocity is insanely fast, the APIs exist already so people can build new products, as well as incorporate into existing services you're using today. Things might feel like a bit of a mess or weird how they're clunked onto software you're using today, but they are indeed genuinely saving time and we're in the "omg that's so cool" honeymoon phase today.

Typically when we get past that honeymoon phase, we usually ask "umm ok now what, the novelty has worn off and now I need to get real work done". However turns out we already are getting more work done, so we think its possible AI may actually shift into a ready to dominate phase. We'll talk more about this in our 2024 Predictions Post however looking back, here are some links to products you should be playing with. Whether you've been living under a rock or if you consider yourself a pro, the enhancements are coming on a weekly basis and I think even the best of us will have a hard time keeping up.

Below are many of the base technology providers we've been playing & testing with and incorporating into our work flow and services. Most of the software you may use like Notion or Canva with added AI powers are generally utilizing one or more of the major players below. Surely you're going to see more new products, services from our members in 2024.

1) ChatGPT from OpenAI

The most popular and well known product and player from this past year. Active & cost effective APIs mean this is the likely source of AI features you're seeing popup in any of your existing softwares and what you may want to incorporate into your projects today. Their product offerings and subscription revenue is heavily weighted on consumers so you can look at a lot of consumer based customer focused efforts from them.

2) Co-pilot from Microsoft

Co-Pilot is powered by ChatGPT, and Microsoft is a 49% owner of OpenAI. They will inextricably be intertwined for the time being, however Microsoft's flavor is enhanced by additional Microsoft Azure technologies and also gives you GPT-4 for free (for now).

3) Claude from Anthropic

The closest competitor to OpenAI+Microsoft dominance. Their founding team actually splintered off from a much younger OpenAI company due to differences in vision. They have partnerships with Amazon's AWS hardware and software stacks as an added differentiator from OpenAI and also their overall focus leans more toward enterprise/large company use cases vs OpenAI's more consumer friendly use cases.

4) Bard from Google

The 800lbs gorilla in the room everyone needs to keep their eyes on. No other company has as large of a treasure trove of user data that is being used to guide free consumer products. Consider how many people in the world use gmail, youtube, android or some Google product. Seemingly today OpenAI has a large lead on consumer usage today however by all accounts google should be in that position. Google Cloud is the 3rd largest provider behind Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, however look for their product to improve vastly through 2024. Especially with the release of their upcoming AI model, Gemini.

5) Grok from x.AI (a spinout from X, formerly twitter)

Currently only accessible to Premium+ customers ($168/yr or $16/mth) and by sheer necessity differs in its approach from OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic & Google. Unlike other AI bots that strive to be politically correct, Grok wants to provide unorthodox, humorous and unconventional answers & approaches to more users. Whether you love him or hate him, Elon Musk and his team has a strategic plan. Unique data is the most valuable aspect of any AI player, and Grok will source real time posts and data from X (the former twitter social media network). It isn't immediately understood how their sibling company partnerships with Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX will be utilized however we're sure that should funnel additional resources, infrastructure needs to Grok/X as they're seemingly tiny compared to their counterparts.

6) Coral from Cohere

Coral is a startup focused on enterprise use natural language AI use cases. Founded by ex Google engineers with investment from giants like Salesforce, Oracle and TigerGlobal and has now reached a $3B valuation. Their goal is not to be the direct to consumer interface like OpenAI or Google Bard but to enable companies to build their own amazing products with a natural language AI. Unlike other contemporaries, Cohere has both public cloud options from AWS, Azure, Google but also on premises based private cloud use cases which is useful for those needed highly secure or proprietary solutions.

7) MidJourney

Photorealistic & stylized visuals using Generative AI is the focus of Midjourney vs text and data seen with other AI technologies listed above. They take a proprietary approach over their open source competitor Stable Diffusion, which means there is a $10/mth charge and you must utilize Discord as the interface to make requests for your images which should be an easier streamlined approach than the kitchen sink approach with other opensource models.

8) Dall-E from OpenAI

Photorealistic & stylized visuals using Generative AI similar to MidJourney however accessible via Web Interfaces and is natively integrated into ChatGPT interfaces which should make it easier for the general public. The cost is included within the ChatGPT $20/subscription but also via pay as you go credits consumed as you make images requests. This service came out strong prior to even ChatGPT due to its Generative AI visuals but has fallen behind Midjourney & Stable diffusion in quality.