alao News in December: These news moved the year in 2023
As the year draws to a close, we take a look at the news that we missed out on or that shaped this year in our December news.
Chaos days at OpenAI
At the end of November, things went haywire at the company behind ChatGPT: First, CEO Sam Altman was fired. In solidarity, other high-ranking developers and management members then left the company; the supervisory board initially opted for former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, which led to an open letter from the workforce – 745 of the 770 employees threatened to resign if Shear became the new CEO. Immediately after Altman’s dismissal, investors campaigned for his return. Just four days after his dismissal, Altman was allowed to return. The Guardian has summarized the dramatic events here.
We can only speculate about the exact reasons for the dismissal. According to the Reuters news agency, OpenAI researchers had previously warned the supervisory board that the internally developed AI “Q*” had become too intelligent. It was able to solve mathematical problems that it had never seen before. Researchers fear that this superintelligence is the first step towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Not only is this superintelligence the starting point for many dystopian sci-fi stories, but numerous ethical and social issues also arise if an AI is more intelligent than a human. Current AI models require human input (“training”) in order to function. However, this input can also be incorrect, which is why chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard often come up with false information.
The tech companies are in trouble
The year was also anything but good for the big tech companies. The Department of Justice in the US, for example, accused Google’s parent company Alphabet of abusing its market power. The secret deal with Apple also came to light during the negotiations. Apple will receive up to 20 billion dollars from the search engine giant to remain the default search engine. If Judge Amit Mehta rules in favor of the DOJ, Alphabet could be broken up in the worst-case scenario. Back in 2020, the DOJ also announced investigations into Apple’s business practices, but has yet to file a lawsuit. One thing is certain: the findings from the Google proceedings are likely to provide the DOJ with new fodder.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has initiated a lawsuit against Amazon. As with Alphabet, the company is accused of abusive market practices. Here too, a secret deal with Apple came to light. If the verdicts are in favor of the US government, the internet of the future could look different.
There is also headwind in the EU. The Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act force so-called gatekeepers to open up and set strict legal limits for platforms. Services that have 45 million users in the EU are referred to as gatekeepers. These include Google search, but also the shopping giant Amazon, the social network Facebook, the iOS operating system and Google’s Chrome browser. You can view the exact list here. As a result, Apple has to open its App Store in the EU and allow so-called sideloading.
This will be felt most by employees – as Computerworld reports, over 250,000 people in the tech industry will have lost their jobs by 2023.
Enshittification: High interest rates make the Internet crappier
Rising interest rates are also clouding the economic outlook. Until now, the growth of many start-ups and platforms has been debt-driven – interest rates were low, after all. However, in order to get inflation under control, the central banks raised key interest rates, with the result that loans became more expensive. Large lenders are also holding back on investments. This particularly affects platforms that have not achieved profitability even in times of low interest rates. Reddit has not recorded a single year of profit since it was founded in 2005. Twitter also only posted profitsin 2018 and 2019 before Musk’s takeover. The streaming giant Netflix is sitting on a gigantic mountain of debt of around 17.5 billion US dollars. The turnaround in interest rates is now forcing these companies to look for alternative sources of revenue. Reddit, for example, used extremely high API fees to lock out third-party developers who had developed alternative Reddit apps. Users are thus indirectly forced to use their own Reddit app and can thus be better monetized. Twitter offers a subscription model with Premium. One streaming provider after another has increased its prices. Only time will tell whether this is enough to make them profitable.
Countries will not pay ransoms to hackers
It feels like every day we read reports that a public authority, institution or company has been the victim of a hacking attack. Almost 30,000 cyber attacks were reported in 2022. The hack on the private IT company XPlain was particularly disastrous, with secret documents and databases appearing on the darknet. In addition to the Federal Office of Police, the Federal Office of Customs and Border Security and the military police were also affected. In November, another hack hit an IT supplier.
Together with 49 other countries, Switzerland has therefore vowed not to pay ransoms in the event of hacking attacks. The official justification: The payment of ransoms would provide an incentive for further hacking attacks.
