What happened in tech in 2022
Tags: 2022, tech
Published: 2023-01-03 06:59:39

2022 felt like a year where Pandora’s box got turned upside down and shaken. HARD. Here’s the 5 biggest things that happened in tech in 2022.  I know you thought we’d say 10, but if you add up the digits in 2022 you get 6… so here’s our 6:

1)	Money ain’t free anymore.  I can’t emphasize how much this started changing the tech and global landscape in 2022.  The changes will ripple on for the next few years. Read this [memo](https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/sea-change) from Howard Marks to understand this sea change better 
 
a.	One of the big points in Howard’s essay is that with ultra-low interest rates, every business was worth a lot more, and buyers could pay a lot more for an asset (your startup), or a share of BigTechCo.  

b.	Here’s a linkedin post from @nrmehta, that explains how free money changed startup land: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7011700928672137216/ 

2)	AI emerged, big-time, like Jarvis taking a command from Iron Man.  

a.	[Bito](https://bito.co) changed the world, no just kidding. Not yet. But we started our ascent to make developer’s lives a lot better. 

b.	But seriously, AlphaFold2 dramatically improved the ability to predict protein structures.  If you want to read a lot more about it go [here](https://towardsdatascience.com/alphafold2-year-1-did-it-change-the-world-499a5a38130a) or check out the code at https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold  

c.	OpenAI has been in existence since 2011, but it seemed that somehow with GPT3.5 (Instruct GPT), ChatGPT, and Dalle-2, what’s possible with AI really exploded.  

![Man standing in front of a stargazer](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/70jyeos69mvg9l17o45e.jpg)

d.	If you look at Bito, we started with a simple tool to explain code.  When GPT3.5 launched, we found that the ability of OpenAI’s models to really understand questions and to really provide great answers improved dramatically. 

3)	Crypto reckoning.  In 2021 it seemed like you either believed crypto was taking over the world, or you were worried about getting innovated out of existence/were a moron.  Kind of the like getting “amazon.comed” in 1999. And then 2022 hit!  Wow, that was a doozy.  Turns out crypto is not yet a good store of value.  Leaving aside massive scams like FTX and most shitcoins going down 99%, two anecdotes tell the story:

a.	One of my VC buddies who made over $1B (yes, Billion) investing in crypto, said “I told my team no more crypto investments unless the use cases are clear.”  What are the use cases again?

b.	One of my favorite entrepreneurs last year was all in on crypto, and was building a startup in the space. Now he’s thrown in the towel, and turning to AI.  Maybe AI will be the next bubble! 

4)	Orca -  The world’s largest carbon capture plant opened in Iceland.  It has the capacity to pull about 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year.  According to Bill Gates https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/14/bill-gates-concepts-to-understand-the-climate-crisis.html, we produce 51 BILLION tons of CO2 each year, so we need 11.5M Orcas.  It might sound like nothing then, but this is technology that was built to scale with a modular design. This is the first step in making carbon capture scale. 

5)	Nuclear fusion.  Nuclear fusion has been done before but we crossed an important milestone this year when the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California created a fusion reaction that created more energy than it consumed.  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/science/nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough.html . Production nuclear fusion is probably several decades away still, but it could be one of the moonshot cures for global warming, then we might not even need to go to Mars!  @elonmusk, uuhhh, could you stop with this Twitter thing, and get us some nuclear fusion?  That seems right up your ally. 

6)     Okay, you caught me, only 5!

Stay tuned for my 2023 predictions!