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What a year, ey? 

At the start of 2023, people were struggling to keep up with the tech world. One day this was getting released, the next day a competitor came out with something else, and then you heard about something new. It was a lot. 

But the momentum continued for the rest of the year, with many companies making history!

2023 was definitely the year of artificial intelligence!

So let’s go through the months and recap what happened..

January

With ChatGPT coming to the market in November 2022, the talks continued at the start of the year 2023. With its continuing success, Microsoft swooped in and announced an investment of $10 billion into OpenAI. 

February

With a lot of hype around OpenAIs ChatGPT, people were wondering if their competitors would come out of the woodwork and place themselves on the market. Google did exactly that with their debut BARD.

Days later, Microsoft also shook the market with its Bing chatbot, in which both Microsoft and OpenAIs CEO dived into the partnership between the two. 

March

2 months in and it seems like a lot is happening already. Access to Bard was given to a limited number of people to kickstart the Google GenAI journey. With that being said, it initiated a domino effect with Adobe introducing Firefly and Canva introducing their virtual design assistant. 

OpenAI also launched APIs for ChatGPT, as well as their text-to-speech model called Whisper. On the 14th of March, OpenAI released its most advanced model GPT-4.

April

A new month and more coming from Google with the announcement of Google DeepMind - a combination of Google Research and DeepMind. 

We also saw Russia's Sberbank release ChatGPT rival GigaChat and HuggingFace also entering the market with the release of an AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT called HuggingChat.

May

Google wanted to remain competitive and felt the pressure and announced the Bard chatbot to the public. But it seemed like they added some fuel to the GenAI fire with Microsoft revealing its debut AI assistant for Windows 11.

With all this happening, you can only imagine how well NVIDIA are doing. Yes, their market capitalisation topped $1 trillion for the first time, holding down its status as the AI chip leader.

Speaking of chips, in this same month, we also experienced Elon Musk's new brain implant startup, called Neuralink, in which the company aims to create and implant AI-powered chips in people’s brains. This was approved by the FDA for human trials.

June

Apple’s Vision Pro, the AI-powered augmented reality headset was developed to take immersive experiences to the next level. 

On the 14th of June, The European Parliament made some negotiations about the EU AI Act, with 499 votes in favor, 28 against, and 93 abstentions.

With all that has happened in the first 6 months of 2023 already, the world of AI seems to look promising. McKinsey predicted that GenAI has the potential to add up to $4.4 trillion in value to the global economy. 

July

July kept the momentum going. Meta introduced Llama 2, an open-source Large Language Model (LLM) which was trained on a mix of publicly available data, and designed to drive applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and other modern chatbots.

Anthropic also released Claude 2, which dethroned ChatGPT and has it shaking in its boots.

The safety around AI is becoming a popular topic as LLMs are dropping from left right and center and are becoming a part of our day-to-day lives. 

Microsoft announced that it will charge customers $30 per month to use Microsoft 365 Copilot, which got other organizations thinking. 

August

Google followed suit and said that it would also be charging $30 per month for users to make use of their GenAI tools in their Duet AI for Workspace. Seems like there's a lot of money to be made.

OpenAI introduced custom instructions to get the most out of ChatGPT. We were also introduced to Poe, a chatbot service that allows you to use state-of-the-art models such as Claude +, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and GPT-4.

September

A third of the year left and AI is already going crazy!

Companies plan to get everything they can and remain competitive in GenAI. Amazon announced a $4 billion investment in OpenAI competitor Anthropic. We also saw some cool but strange things for example the AI personalities featured on Metas apps such as Tom Brady and Kendall Jenner. 

With a focus on content creation so far, OpenAI continues with its quest to visualize content with a Canva plugin for ChatGPT.

October

We experienced the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. This also was shaking up the AI world, with CEOs, leaders, and others having contradicting opinions about the implementation of AI systems into society.

November

Let’s start with chatbots. Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, unveiled the AI chatbot “Grok”, AWS with the release of Amazon Q, and Pika 1.0 from StabilityAI.

OpenAI also held its first developer event in November, where it delved into GPT-4 Turbo and the GPT Store. 

But it went a bit mad after that with OpenAIs CEO Sam Altman getting fired by the board out of nowhere. He was immediately offered a job by Microsoft with OpenAI employees threatening to resign if Sam Altman did not come back and claim his position as CEO. So now he is back, with some new board members as well as a new "observer" role for Microsoft. 

December

A lot of madness so far in the last 11 months right? We’re finally coming to the end of 2023. 

And just before the year ends, Google came to shake the market again with their 3 variant family of large language models and ChatGPT's new rival: Gemini. 

We already know that OpenAI is looking into GPT 5, 6, and 7. So let’s see what 2024 January has to bring. 

Wrapping the Year up

Wow - what a year!

2023 has represented a significant leap in the world of AI, which goes beyond coding and algorithmic abilities. We are witnessing how our day-to-day lives can be improvised with AI systems such as chatbots and content creation for tasks such as marketing. 

With this being said, we should all look forward to what 2024 has to bring with the integration of technology and humanity.
 
 

Nisha Arya is a data scientist, freelance technical writer, and an editor and community manager for KDnuggets. She is particularly interested in providing data science career advice or tutorials and theory-based knowledge around data science. Nisha covers a wide range of topics and wishes to explore the different ways artificial intelligence can benefit the longevity of human life. A keen learner, Nisha seeks to broaden her tech knowledge and writing skills, while helping guide others.