once upon a time, Silicon Valley was a dream. Technology and the Internet would help democracy spread, connect people and allow us to be more present. Instead, social networks have amplified misinformation and harassment, we are more than ever slaves to our smartphones and small investors have lost all their savings invested in cryptocurrencies. Good riddance 2022, hoping for the best in 2023.
Elon Musk buys Twitter and transforms the network
The soap opera of the year lasted more than six months. Elon Musk made a $ 44 billion offer to buy Twitter, withdrew it to try to lower the bill before finally agreeing to honor his commitment under the threat of a losing lawsuit.
Nearly two-thirds of employees have been fired or resigned, and Musk has decreed a quasi-general amnesty in the name of freedom of expression, reinstating thousands of suspended accounts, including that of Donald Trump. He then suspended the account of a student who shared the real-time geolocation of his private jet, then those of half a dozen journalists who shared the link or covered this showdown.
But his polls backfired. At 57%, the twittos voted for him to leave the head of the social network, which he undertook to do once he had found a good CEO. A decision which is undoubtedly not unrelated to the anger of the shareholders of Tesla, which has lost 70% of its value in one year. As a result, Elon Musk’s fortune was halved, and he gave up his title as the richest man in the world to Frenchman Bernard Arnault.
Cryptos Crash, FTX Goes Bankrupt
” winter is coming for the crypto sector. Bitcoin, ether, ripple… In 2022, cryptocurrencies lost almost two thirds of their value, with more than 2,000 billion dollars destroyed. A collapse notably caused by the doubts of investors after the crash of the Terra / Luna ecosystem in the spring, with its founder, the South Korean Do Kwon, targeted by an arrest warrant and a red notice from Interpol.
The sector initially seemed to rebound, thanks in particular to the white knight Sam Bankman-Fried, at the head of FTX. But the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, collapsed like a house of cards in November. The second largest donor to the Democratic Party during the midterms, “SBF” was extradited from the Bahamas to the United States, where he was charged with fraud. He appears to have used billions of dollars from FTX to cover the losses of his investment fund Alameda Research. We should know on January 3 if he pleads guilty or if he chooses to go to trial.
ChatGPT, Dall-e… AI creates, amazes and challenges
2022, year of creation by the machine. OpenAI’s artificial intelligence rocked Silicon Valley, first with the intelligent Dall-E art generator, capable of imitating a master’s canvas or creating surreal images from a textual description. But it is above all its chatbot ChatGPT that fascinates. A milestone as exciting as it is worrying has been crossed: it becomes impossible to differentiate between text written by a human and by a machine.
ChatGPT can explain general relativity to children or write a terminal philosophy essay. It provides precise answers to complex questions and aims to come and threaten the supremacy of Google. But the machine is sometimes completely wrong, without being able to realize it. A potentially explosive cocktail, especially for misinformation.
The dark year of Meta
In September 2021, Mark Zuckerberg is on top of the world: Facebook exceeds 1,000 billion dollars on the stock market for the first time. The young manager then tries a game of poker: he changes the name of his company, which becomes Meta, and bets everything on the metaverse and virtual reality, which he sees as the next computer revolution, after the PC and the smartphone. A year later, it’s a hangover.
The Californian giant’s net profit has been halved, its share price by three, and the Reality Labs division is expected to lose more than $12 billion, with heavy investments and a market that is not taking off. Mark Zuckerberg is hunkering down and Meta is tightening its belt, with 11,000 layoffs announced in November (13% of its workforce). If employees and shareholders are beginning to question his choices, Zuckerberg remains unchallenged for the moment, for a simple reason: he owns the majority of voting shares, and therefore cannot be fired by his board.
Historic breakthrough for nuclear fusion
This is the Holy Grail of physics: producing clean energy, without greenhouse gas emissions or radioactive waste, using the principle of nuclear fission, the reaction at the heart of stars like the Sun. For the first time, American researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have taken a critical step: for a brief moment, they produced more energy than that used by lasers to cause the reaction.
If the balance remains in deficit by counting the electricity necessary for the initial activation of the lasers, the researchers believe they can improve the efficiency of the system. Be careful, it will probably take another two or three decades before large-scale applications. It remains more necessary than ever to limit emissions, pending a potential new technological era.