What’s hot in technology this year
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Last year, crypto, big corporate jobs and the metaverse were hot in the tech industry.
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This year, with layoffs, an explosion in generative AI, and growing interest in living forever, the list looks a little different.
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Here’s Insider’s definitive list of everything that is – and isn’t – in the tech industry.
Here’s what’s in…
Artificial intelligence
The technology industry has been rocked by a revolution in generative AI in recent months.
Since OpenAI released its lively chatbot ChatGPT last November, major tech giants have been scrambling to compete. In February, Google unveiled its ChatGPT competitor Bard, which it officially launched to the public in March. Microsoft also had a new version of the Bing search engine with an AI assistant called Sydney in February.
Smaller AI startups have also launched their own chatbots, such as Anthropic’s Claude.
Venture capitalists have poured millions into new investments in the field. Tech workers use AI tools for everything, including research and coding.
Ammaar Reshi, who works at the SF-based fintech company Brex, said he has overheard some “crazy” remarks amid the AI frenzy celebrating Silicon Valley, including recently: “I really think you can recreate the human soul with AI .”
San Francisco
During the pandemic, the San Francisco metro area ceded some of its dominance over the tech industry to growing hubs in cities like Miami and Austin.
Now, entrepreneurs are rushing back to build startups that take advantage of generative AI. The neighborhood of Hayes Valley in particular has become such a hotspot for new AI startups that it has been jokingly renamed “Cerebral Valley.”
Venture capitalists and those with more enterprise technology jobs are also heading back to the office.
Four Bay Area-based tech workers told Insider they go in to meet with colleagues, grab a coffee or just get out of their apartments. Their general consensus is that working from home is on the way out and working from the office is back.
Security card swipe data also shows that office occupancy in the San Francisco metro area has increased since the beginning of the year.
Brex’s Ammaar Reshi told Insider that it has become common to say “SF is back” at least once in conversation.
Playing pickleball
Pickleball—a racquet sport similar to tennis—has become one of Silicon Valley’s favorite pastimes for taking a break from work and building relationships.
Venture capitalists have previously told Insider that the popularity of pickleball speaks to a broader shift away from club forms of socializing to more accessible ones in the venture community.
“A lot of the things that used to be fashionable I probably wouldn’t do anymore, like golf outings or whiskey nights or cigar tastings,” Rak Garg, principal at Bain Capital Ventures, and pickleball enthusiast, previously told Insider.
“It’s not very inclusive. That’s why I think pickleball and all these other things are better. It just makes everyone feel more at home.”
Across the country, the percentage of pickleball players is also growing rapidly, and participation in the sport has increased by 40% in the past two years. Last week, New York’s Central Park added 14 pickleball courts that will be available to players for the next six months.
Cold plunge
Jack Dorsey is perhaps as famous now for co-founding Twitter as he is for his fastidious health regime – which includes regular ice baths.
While Dorsey said he started taking ice baths in the evenings in 2016, the rest of the tech industry has caught up.
Four tech workers told Insider that cold plunges have become ubiquitous as a productivity and antiaging hack.
Dr. Anant Vinjamoori, chief physician at Modern Age, a New York-based health care company focused on longevity, previously told Insider that plunging into an ice-cold bath results in “an increase in the production of neurotransmitters like epinephrine and dopamine.” which have immediate rejuvenating and energizing effects, he said.
Another clear sign that it’s a cold? Venture capitalist Turner Novak recently joked about a founder who didn’t do it take “cold 5am step.”
Taking metformin
Metformin, a pill prescribed for diabetes, has become increasingly popular with Silicon Valley’s biohackers as a way to slow the onset of disease and improve the aging process.
The drug helps regulate blood sugar and reduce appetite which boosts metabolism and stimulates a cellular clean-up process known as autophagy.
In January, Brianne Kimmel, a venture capitalist who founded the firm Worklife Ventures, tweeted about metformin use across San Francisco, saying “everybody’s probably on it” but “nobody’s talking about it.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said his personal anti-aging regimen includes metformin.
Hackathons
The hottest weekend event in San Francisco right now might be a hackathon.
Hackathons are social coding events where programmers (and others in the industry) collaborate on a project with a tight deadline.
The AI revolution heating up Silicon Valley has made hackathons an effective way for people to network into the industry.
Worklife’s Kimmel previously told Insider “It’s so early in the AI ecosystem that many of the conversations that are being had are mostly either dinners with less than 10 people or self-organized and self-funded hackathons that happen on weekends.”
And on the East Coast, technology mixers are growing in popularity.
Several attendees at a recent tech mixer in New York hosted by Andrew Yeung — a product manager at Google who has become known for hosting tech networking events — said they have a strong desire to meet people face-to-face after years of Zoom calls .
What is out…
Drinking alcohol
Last October, Ada Yeo, principal and chief of staff at the venture company Khosla Ventures, tweeted that “not drinking” had become a new “technological status signal”.
Although alcohol and liquor sales increased in the early days of the pandemic, many tech workers now appear to be moving away from alcohol because of its impact on productivity, Bay Area therapist Annie Wright told Insider. There is an increase in “alcohol-free” parties, too, Wright said.
Even Marc Andreessen, the veteran venture capitalist who launched Andreessen Horowitz, admitted in a blog post last month that he stopped drinking alcohol six months ago and feels much better.
Crypto
At the beginning of 2022, the crypto world was on fire – in a good way.
Prices for major cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and Bitcoin were high, wealthy customers rushed to collect digital art backed by NFTs, and the founder of a well-known crypto exchange called FTX was a multi-billionaire.
But then FTX collapsed, ushering in a cold crypto winter that continued into 2023.
In January, major companies in the cryptocurrency industry such as Genesis, Coinbase, Blockchain.com and Crypto.com announced plans to cut their workforce. The legal battle surrounding Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire has grown more and more each day. Crypto founders are also struggling to find places to house their money amid the collapse of crypto-friendly banks.
Now founders like Ankur Nagpal, who has launched startups like Teachable and Ocho, say attending an NFT conference in 2023 is “embarrassing.”
Big corporate jobs
It’s hard to talk about the tech industry in 2023 without talking about layoffs at tech companies, including Meta and Microsoft as well as smaller startups.
The mass job cuts began last year as business growth slowed and labor costs began to rise, with companies such as Meta, Twitter and Netflix announcing significant cuts. Those layoffs have extended into 2023, with cloud computing company Salesforce laying off 8,000 employees and companies such as Amazon and Google announcing historic job cuts.
In the middle of the corporate life, many technology workers find new meaning outside of their corporate jobs. Some have realized that their company is not their family, while others have turned side hustles into lucrative full-time jobs.
Reshi told Insider that those who still have jobs have stopped going to the gym because their company has cut wellness stipends. Others, he has observed, are cutting back on ordering food from DoorDash, citing the “macro economy.”
Moving to Miami
Whether it was for lower taxes, the booming crypto scene or the nightlife, tech workers and investors alike flocked to Miami last year.
This year, the move to Miami has caught on with the tech crowd, therapist Annie Wright told Insider.
“It’s about chasing the hottest job opportunities, and right now they seem to be in California again because of AI,” Wright said.
“Those who moved to Miami to take advantage of crypto tax breaks are moving back to Silicon Valley, based on what I’m hearing and seeing,” she added.
The Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg’s love affair with the metaverse is on the rocks.
Over the past couple of years, Zuckerberg has fixated on the idea that a new, sweeping virtual world would be the future of his business. But Reality Labs, the division of Meta that builds the metaverse, lost billions.
This year, however, he seems to have pushed that vision under the rug and rarely mentions the metaverse in public statements. Reality Labs was also not spared when 10,000 employees were cut at Meta in March.
And Meta is not the only company that has undergone a makeover.
Apple has postponed plans for its augmented reality glasses, and Microsoft announced cutbacks to its HoloLens division. In late March, Disney laid off its entire metaverse team.
Keith George, co-founder of e-commerce marketplace platform Cortina, told Insider that one of his biggest takeaways from this year’s Shoptalk — a major retail conference — was that the metaverse was “out.”
There is “still no existing use case with a real ROI” for the metaverse, George wrote in his conference notes, which were seen by Insider.
Read the original article on Business Insider
