Forem: Amar Goel

Tech predictions for 2023

Amar Goel — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 04:23:54 +0000

Now that we're getting into 2023, it's time to pull out my crystal ball, and tell you what's going to happen in 2023. Ha ha.

Here are my tech predictions for 2023:

1. AI will continue to explode, and you will start to see it in a lot more places finally. AI is truly getting democratized. Google’s TensorFlow and OpenAI are making it as easy as using an API. Most CEOs are waking up to ChatGPT and finally asking “Uhh, what are we doing about AI?” Prediction: 75% of consumer apps and business apps will utilize AI in some way.

A little sub-prediction: GPT4 will launch in the second half of 2023, some estimates have it at 100 trillion parameters (compared to 175B for GPT3), but who knows.

2. We will go through a real recession, and the pain for companies and employees globally will be significant. A lot of layoffs are coming in q1 2022 (many companies didn’t want to layoff people right before the holidays). Witness Amazon increasing the size of it’s layoffs and Salesforce laying off 10k workers.

3. Semiconductors are becoming the new digital gold. The market may anticipate a significant decrease in semiconductor equipment spending, however, I expect that the competition for technological leadership, tech autonomy, geopolitical concerns, and lack of supply in various arenas will result in real semi turbulence.

4. AR/VR will hit a real critical mass. The user base will grow to at least 50M people from 10M currently. It could go to 200M the year after as Apple enters the market with it’s headset, though Oculus remains the leader.

Okay, let's check back in a year and see how I did.
What do you think? Which of these do you agree with? Which ones are dead wrong?

What happened in tech in 2022

Amar Goel — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 06:59:39 +0000

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 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 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 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.

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!

Bito AI: Change how you do dev with AI, in your IDE

Amar Goel — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 19:46:02 +0000

Hi Dev Community, 👋

I am excited to bring you Bito AI, a product that we think can transform your development experience. We want to help you be a 10x developer, or at least save a couple of hours a day!

As a developer there are so many things to do, from actually writing code, to testing it, to remembering syntax, understanding new code, making your code secure and performant, etc – the list goes on and on. Many of them are boring, and don’t let you focus on high impact work. 😤

We thought wouldn’t it be great if we could use AI to help you do this, and thus Bito’s AI was born. 🤞 Bito’s AI Assistant is like a Swiss Army knife that can do so many things – and make you that elusive 10x developer!

It works right in your favorite IDE (we support Visual Studio Code and all Jetbrains IDEs like IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, etc) and is also available as a Chrome Extension. Check out our 2-minute demo.

Bito AI is a FREE app! 👍

What does Bito’s AI Assistant help with? Basically, ask any technical question:

☝️ Command Syntax: “how to set git config variables”, “create an encrypted s3 bucket using the AWS cli”

🥇 Test Cases: “Generate test cases for this code ”

🔑 Explain code: “explain this code ”

🔥Generate Code: Examples: “code in java to convert a number from one base to another”, “code to implement a simple rest API in go”

✍️ Comment Method: “Explain this code and explain the parameters ”

⚡ Improve Performance: “how can I improve performance of this code ”

🔒 Check Security: “Is this code secure?”

📽️ Explain concepts: "explain B+ trees, give an example with code", “explain banker’s algorithm”

Trained on billions of lines of code and millions of docs, it’s pretty incredible what Bito AI can help you do without having to search the web or waste time on tedious stuff.

We'd love to have you try it out, let us know what you think! It’s totally free. We know we have a long way to go, but your feedback will make it incredible!

One more thing: Security is something we take very seriously, and we never store or view your code in any way.

Thanks so much for your feedback. Please email us at founders@bito.co with any questions, we are really eager to get your thoughts.

-Amar, Anand, and Mukesh
Bito AI