- Microsoft will continue to grow. Their tech ecosystem is hyper-expansive, touching everything related to development and IT (.Net, TypeScript, Github, VSCode, PowerPlatform, Azure, etc.). Please don't directly come at me with moral qualms or commentary on the quality of their products - I'm just the messenger.

- Low-code tooling will see a growth spurt, not driven by "citizen developers" but by increased developer adoption of technologies that offer a good DX and a capability to integrate seamlessly into "normal" dev workflows. Tech like Retool, Plasmic, Builder.io, PowerPlatform, new-gen ETLs, etc.

- The "citizen developer" paradigm will remain largely unsolved. The vision holds all its initial potential but it requires a multi-pronged, universal, push involving corporate politics, compliance, security, training, etc. that cannot be solved by a single company. We might see interesting initiatives or companies built around this in 2023, but a year won't be enough time to solve it.

- There will be a massive proliferation of GPT-based apps. Many will be shite, a few will be useful.

- Rising interest rates will push investment mass away from startups and into the other end of the spectrum: good old bonds and other fixed-rate assets.

- There will be a rising movement of software dev methodologies and training on how to use AI-assisted coding (Copilot, ChatGPT) effectively.

- ChatGPT will not replace coders at least in 2023, and the bitter non-tech people who are expressing uninformed opinions on its code-gen capabilities, observing from the sidelines and waiting for some sort of comeuppance, are not going to get it.

- React will continue to be a standard but coding a form will be as difficult as it was back in fucking 2013. I love the tech otherwise, but c'mon.

I'll make an anti-prediction instead. People will fail to find decent use cases for ChatGPT/etc. We'll get used to the fact that AI models can generate language that looks indistinguishable from humans on the surface, but there won't be profound impact. GPT-3 was released in 2020, and generative image models have been decent since ~2017. In the short term there hasn't been as huge of an impact as many have predicted. It'll probably happen very slowly over the next 5-10 years. People overestimate the short term.

Twitter is going to be interesting to watch. I think it'll either crash and burn, or become huge doing something very different from what it is now.

EDIT: I'll add one more. Meta will keep declining and fails to deliver anything meaningful wrt. Metaverse.

I’m not an expert in anything, just wild guesses projecting some of my biases:

1- significant portion of mass market retail becomes automated. Labor is getting too expensive and entitled. Everyone needs to hire no one wants to work and businesses can’t make $20 minimum wages profitable.

2- Drone military spending goes up by 10-100x. Fueled again by enlistment shortages and arms proliferation and need for deterrence.

3- AR/VR becomes the most hyped consumer technology (more than now). People are thirsting for something new and a 100 megapixel camera in the phone doesn’t move the needle

4- More and more companies announce migration away from Chinese manufacturing. Vietnam and India become primary beneficiaries. Global undeclared economic war wages on.

5- Google and Fb will see persistent losses in active usage. They are too addicted to the ad money and user experience is becoming borderline hostile.

6- Still won’t be able to buy PS5 if you want one. Nintendo will continue to milk the switch without a meaningful update. Won’t stop unless sales dry up.

General Trend: Balkanization of the Internet continues and significantly accelerates.

Specific Prediction: Google services are banned by a number of countries, and separately their search business is disrupted by AI generated content to the point that their algorithms stop working as intended.

* Twitter files for bankruptcy.

* Bing grows in popularity as it incorporates OpenAI technologies.

* Web3 starts its decline into irrelevance. VCs stop investing.

* Crypto contagion continues but remains relevant due to CBDCs.

* XR becomes the new hype technology courtesy of the Apple XR launch.

* Uber will decline as Cruise self driving robo-taxis expand across the US.

2022 predictions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29760026

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236

By the end of 2023, blockchains will still not have 1 (one) real use case.

We are going to have massive shift towards rejuvenation. That is the thing that everybody wants including countries as a whole.

Who wouldn't want to reverse aging and almost fix most of the disease and costs associated with it on their population. Who, on individual level, wouldn't want to look 20 again.

Right now, the problem seems to be that we, in general, we do not believe that such thing is possible.

This will change as soon as we have a robust rejuvenation event at least in mice. After that, the rejuvenation is going to be the new field where all the investors money will go.

On a more modest perspective, stuff related to health and longevity will also see growth. New sensors, new ways to gradually improve health using tech.

- Big Tech becoming more privacy-friendly (just like Apple who just enabled end-to-end encryption on iCloud)

- Mostly a lot of the same stagnation we've seen in the tech industry for the past 5 years.

- Some sprouts of innovation around generative language, probably around fact checking, detecting and removing "hallucinations" from models. But probably not anything significant enough to significantly shift anything for every day users (probably have to wait 2025 for that).

- Crypto folks will keep believing that they're building the future, although everything indicates that Big Tech is finding a way to become safer, more private, without having to become fully decentralized.

* Generative imagery starts finding commercial use cases, with advertising as the first destination.

* Copilot continues growing among developers, and eventually reaches a point where it's as essential as autocomplete or syntax highlighting.

* Venture capital remains dry for half of the year.

* Someone - with bets on figma - ships a feature that auto generates react code from a design. This process is ripe for automation.

* TiKTok continues to face greater pressure from US regulators and politicians until a US hosted spinoff is forced into creation.

Java (both the language, but especially the platform) will become even more popular. The work done on it is phenomenal, it’s getting better FFI, Loom is a game changer and value types may actually start to make a debut next year. All this with a blooming language ecosystem, and I didn’t even mention GraalVM, which allows even more language to target the platform, sometimes with better speed then they would otherwise have, complete with polyglot interop.

I think everyone focuses on the major trends. But there are important background/side trends.

As people realize the drawbacks of silos and the benefit of more intentionally crafted data, Linked Data and other network relative data schemes will become more popular, in addition to their uses for AI systems (which should be the biggest "site" of them all, and something LD is created for).

I would characterize AI as 80% accurate so far. But getting one in five things wrong is not good enough for many tasks. Human/machine oriented data formats like Linked Data will help close this gap, as contributed by projects like Wikidata and increasingly smaller scale apps through better defined SEO (schema.org), for example. Breakthroughs in easily working with Linked Data at day to day levels would be helpful here, right now libraries even for specific domains are very nuts and bolts compared to ORM libraries. For common querying, perhaps GraphQL with network schemas will start to gain mainstream popularity.

We should also see breakthroughs in open standards data carrier formats, like decentralized wallets and credentials. These will have have significant impact because they are essentially like free-floating sites that interact with any site.

Okay, you said “apart from ChatGPT”, but that doesn’t seem fair and since nobody said it yet:

I think 2023 is the year AGI becomes a serious and mainstream topic. There will be new versions of OpenAI’s work, that will incorporate layers for correctness checking and reinforcement learning. Versions of itself that start to improve off each other.

As technical limitation after technical limitation is solved or lifted, HN and engineers at large start having discussions about what it means to be an AGI in no true Scotsman style (“no, if it can’t exactly be taught how to create a startup, fundraise for it and have a 7bn dollar exit then it’s not REAL AGI”), until at some point in the next years we stop caring about that discussion as we moved on from “are we there yet” to “what now”.

This will be longer than a year as an ordeal. I predict we will look back at 2023 as when it all started. Even though, as we all know, it didn’t, GPT had been around for a while and has been building on the shoulders of giants; but for the mainstream, it absolutely hasn’t started yet.

The Figma acquisition will likely be under investigation by regulators before it goes any further. That is almost certain.

- WFH will increase and thus apps and processes that support this. For example, I expect we have one additional team communication product on the Slack/Teams level of popularity. Focusing on either privacy or more employer surveillance.

- Legal issues for AI coding help.

- Commercial support/add-ons for the "fediverse". Resulting in a lot of de-federalization and thus at least two sub-spheres.

- AAA gaming will tackle the new rise of AI. Better bots, for one (your computer will now insult your mom, too). Prompting tech journalists to coin horrible new pseudo-acronyms like "AIAIAI" or "AAAAI".

- More people moving away from VSC due to better LSP integration in existing and new editors (Helix, neovim etc.)

- You'll read a lot more about "permacomputing", with no definite products.

- Metaverse will continue to fail, possible new book by Jared Lanier gloating.

I don't expect ChatGPT will have much impact in 2023 or in general. ChatGPT etc, will be used by some devs as just as some devs like IDEs vs editors, or how often devs search the web or SO. I've rarely ever been limited by how long it takes to implement an idea, or coming up with an idea when I could clearly express the problem.

Edit: What would be cool is if ChatGPT et al, could take an implementation as input and generate all the test descriptions in natural language (source too, why not). That would expose unintended hidden or mistaken assumptions in the implementation.

I think Digital currencies and Rust.

More chinise apps will conquer the market like tiktok is doing

this is the year of the linux desktop of course!

1) As generating content at scale becomes more accessible , social media might become completely useless. Making "closed groups" more mainstream.

2) A new Spam filter will be desperately required to fight mail and blog junk generated by chatgpt like models.

3) Students might be able to learn coding fast assisted by AI, instead of searching for issues, as they can get instant response.

Here's my company's collective list - https://terminusdb.com/blog/tech-trends-for-2023/ - the one I particularly like and hope happens is cloud services as a public utility.

I'm not even going to try on this one.

in an age of computer generated content, public websites will become garbage heaps of object spam no matter how much verification and moderation you throw at it

the only interesting spaces will be anonymous and invite-only

the internet becomes balkanized as international cyberattacks increase in frequency

Google Search quality will continue to get worse.

I’d love to see one of the FAANGs endorsing and/or promoting or liberating their tech docs solutions, including better lightweight markup for docs (not that Asciidoc and rST are bad, but they aren’t super popular yet). JetBrains is about to do that, for example: https://lp.jetbrains.com/writerside/

AI will unlock many new tech branches that were below the threshold of being useful before, for example AR

Number 35 will be factored using Shor's algorithm on quantum computer.

Defi.

By the end of 2023 majority of the worlds population will be roaming Facebook's MetaVerse on a daily basis. Work In Meta Verse is the new WFH!

Nothing particularly interesting outside of AI. But, a lot of interesting new products enabled by the integration of GPT-3, maybe even in the crypto scene.

For example, there have always been ideas floating around about creating a blockchain based repository of scientific knowledge or social media or whatever. The main blockers for ideas like that were always content moderation at scale: how do you know that what someone is uploading is legitimate or follows the rules? How do you moderate content without an overlord? There need to be systems in place to:

- filter out garbage and toxicity,

- allow heterodox submissions (no political censorship),

- and do it all without some kind of admin/moderator

Now GPT-3 can be used to pre-validate content. It can tell you whether a submission follows some kind of logical reasoning, isn't spam, and isn't anti-social. It's not 100% accurate, but it's good enough, and it can be tweaked.

Beyond that, GPT-3 can be used for all sorts of tools like automated codebase documentation (no more writing for developers, yay!), news trend-spotting (for traders/finance), generating landing page copy, etc.