As the year 2023 begins, we take a look back at some of the most notable events in the world of technology that generated buzz last year.
ChatGPT stunned the world
The test release of ChatGPT, the latest initiative from the OpenAI Foundation, has swept the internet by storm because it blends natural-language processing with search abilities to produce content and essays that are stunningly natural. Its responses are human-like. Critics have stated that this system is able to create extremely human-like responses to writing prompts. Although it is possible that it could be beneficial as a composition tool or aid in specific circumstances, it is quite doubtful that it will anytime soon replace writing that was written by humans.
Musk purchased Twitter
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October and the subsequent firing of the company’s senior executives, including Parag Aggarwal, who served as CEO at the time, was the event that generated the most buzz throughout the whole year. Not only did he fire employees, but he also made several alterations to the way Twitter functions. Every significant event that occurred on Twitter, from Musk’s takeover to the firing of staff to the making of policy modifications to the conclusion of WFH, was in the spotlight and made headlines.
Lapsus$ hackers cause havoc across the tech sector.
Microsoft disclosed in March that its computer systems had been breached by the hacking and ransomware gang known as Lapsus$. The group was responsible for releasing essential source code for several of the company’s products, including Bing, Bing Maps, and Cortana. Microsoft made the announcement. The organization gained access to Microsoft’s information by compromising a corporate account through the use of social engineering.
Other well-known businesses, such as Samsung, Nvidia, Vodafone, and Okta, are included on the list of victims of this criminal organization. In the UK, arrests were made, and an investigation into the group’s methods revealed that Lapsus$ was made up of inexperienced teenage hackers who used methods that were “poorly thought out”
The failure of FTX has prompted calls for further crypto regulation
The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November, which occurred amid claims of internal mismanagement and criminality, dealt a significant blow to the cryptocurrency industry and caused $8 billion in assets to evaporate into thin air. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of FTX, was taken into custody in December in the Bahamas and later extradited to the United States to face criminal charges there.
The cryptocurrency market has experienced the usual level of volatility last year, and the collapse of FTX has brought the sector’s instability squarely into the spotlight. In the event that authorities do not establish some kind of regulatory framework for the trading of cryptocurrencies, analysts have projected that cryptocurrencies would face some challenging times in the future.
The end of telecommuting for employees of all of the major tech companies
The most significant shift in the market occurred in 2022 when numerous businesses made the decision to stop allowing their workers the option to “Work from Home.” During the uncertain times, the pandemic led work-from-home a big thing. However, as the situation began to improve, all of the main IT companies around the began summoning staff back to offices. Despite this, the staff was hesitant to join the back offices, and this pattern was observed everywhere.
IT industry was shaken up by layoffs
Companies such as Amazon, Meta, and Google have been at the forefront of the tech hiring industry for quite some time and have continued to do so in 2022, albeit for a variety of reasons. The labor market in the technology industry has struggled in 2022 in the face of headwinds from the global economy, and the three major giants, along with a large number of other smaller technology companies, have each let go of thousands of employees.
It has been reported that Amazon is responsible for laying off 20,000 employees, which highlights the magnitude of the seismic shift occurring in the technological job market. In the early stages of the pandemic, larger technology firms, in particular, went on a hiring frenzy to take advantage of an uptick in demand for cloud-based services. This has now sharply reversed, marking a strong reversal in the trend that we see with the layoffs. As the surge began to level down, revenue began to fall, ushering in a year of unpredictability and layoffs of personnel.