San Francisco
CNN
—
It was a protracted yr for Silicon Valley, however it could have felt even longer to outsiders, who watched the tech world basically implode and regroup over the course of 2023 in methods each typical (layoffs, restructurings) and deeply unhinged (every little thing under).
From the failure of its biggest bank to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s bizarre Vogue spread, common folks this yr appeared to get a glimpse into the tech elite that was weirder and extra private than ever.
One notice: There’s no Elon Musk on our checklist, because the tech billionaire’s 2023 antics went far past bizarre and into areas together with antisemitism, giving a platform to Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and doing little to handle virulently racist, sexist and harassing content material on X. That’s not simply in accordance with us (and other people with eyes). That’s in accordance with a number of media watchdogs — which Musk has, in turn, sued.
Right here, in no explicit order, are the CNN tech crew’s 5 favorites.
The rise of the synthetic intelligence chatbot grabbed headlines in 2023, however some of the seen moments was a extremely learn and very weird conversation between New York Occasions reporter Kevin Roose and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot in February.
What was speculated to be a primer on how the instrument labored devolved quickly right into a fever dream of robotic hallucinations and an increasingly creepy conversation that culminated within the chatbot, which known as itself Sydney, asking Roose to depart his spouse.
The dialog was the primary time many readers really started to surprise, is AI actually a good suggestion for humanity?
The shortage of ladies in Silicon Valley has been well-documented for many years, however nowhere was it extra obvious than on the talking roster of the DevTernity tech convention, which seemingly had just one (actual) lady speaker.
However issues obtained actually odd when convention organizer Eduards Sizovs stated in a submit on X that no less than one feminine profile was “auto-generated, with a random title, random Twitter deal with, random image,” the Related Press reported, creating a fake speaker profile of a girl, a change that was observed rapidly and finally led to the shutdown of your complete occasion.
Amazon Net Companies government Kristine Howard wrote in a submit on LinkedIn that the revelation and extra apparently faux speaker profiles result in her resolution to drop out, saying, “I discovered that I used to be the one lady on the agenda, and a number of the others marketed might not be actual.”
Sizovs stated in a press release to CNN that he believes the convention was intentionally focused by opponents trying to shut it down after it launched succesfully in 2015.
“Success, nonetheless, could cause discomfort to some,” he stated. “Subsequently, if the check speaker placeholder hadn’t mistakenly appeared on the manufacturing web site, these attempting to show down the convention would discover one other strategy to obtain their final aim.”
The shortage of housing within the Bay Space is a continuing headline, nevertheless it hit a totally out of left subject velocity bump final spring when information broke {that a} group of tech billionaires together with Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs had quietly bought up 55,000 acres on the Bay Space’s edge in a bid to construct a utopian metropolis to deal with their employees and reinvent city design.
This got here as a shock to the farmers who had farmed domestically for generations and had been questioning why all their neighbors have been promoting up and sparked an ongoing probe by the federal authorities involved about proximity to Travis Air Power Base.
The trial of former crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried was anticipated to have a number of fascinating revelations given the dimensions of the multi-billion-dollar firm he’d constructed.
However nobody may have presumably anticipated forehead-slappers like:
- FTX’s huge $600,000 tab at Jimmy Buffett theme restaurant Margaritaville
- a request from SBF’s mother and father for greater than a $200,000 wage, which allegedly resulted in a $10 million money reward and a number of Bahamanian properties
- a recounting of assorted schemes to sway overseas officers with bribes and which no less than one witness stated concerned “Thai prostitutes”
- the virtually instant flipping of Bankman-Fried’s second-in-command and erstwhile girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
Bankman-Fried was ultimately convicted on seven prison counts after mere hours of jury deliberation and now faces a most sentence of 115 years in jail. You may see CNN’s rundown of the wildest moments in our analysis here.
Maybe the freshest bizarre tech second in our collective minds is the whirlwind ouster and reinstatement of OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman over a five-day saga in November.
From the late-night Friday firing, to 2 rapidly put in after which dethroned interim CEOs, to a letter signed by many of the firm demanding Altman come again and Microsoft’s provide to rent each Altman and all disgruntled employees, the minute-by-minute adjustments within the scenario gave watchers loads of drama and whiplash.
The pure depth of the protection and whirlwind of circumstances created per week of OpenAI headlines and information blasts — only for Altman to wind up right back where he’d started.
The debacle left people wondering how a company may deal with any scandal that badly and whether or not that firm needs to be entrusted with constructing a number of the world’s most consequential future expertise.