Top 5 Stories of the Week: ChatGPT, CES, and Cybersecurity Advice from AWS

Happy second full week of 2023. While our poor colleagues in California saw rain, more rain and prolonged power outages, the news from CES in Las Vegas was hot, hot, hot.

But first, senior writer/editor Sharon Goldman broke the news that ChatGPT may be coming to Microsoft Office as early as March this year. Will it be more useful than the much-aligned Clippy? Stay tuned.

Our second and third top stories are summaries from CES. In the first, our intrepid (and very tired) head writer Dean Takahashi discusses the top 18 things he saw from the 3,000 exhibitors at the event. In the second CES story, Goldman highlights the AI ​​and ML news from CES and what it means for enterprises.

Our fourth story of the week also comes from the AI ​​beat. This one is a little less optimistic, however, as it shows that AI companies are not immune to the effects of the current economic downturn.

Finally, our fifth story is our security beat. Writer/Editor Taryn Plumb interviewed AWS security leaders to get their predictions for 2023. Spoiler alert: Zero trust can be called.

Here are the top five stories for the week of January 9.

Over the weekend, The Information reported that Microsoft wants to add OpenAI’s chatbot technology – currently ChatGPT, soon GPT-4 – to its Office suite of productivity technologies, including Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. And let today, reported Semafor that Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, is in talks to invest another $10 billion in the company.

The flood of news from Microsoft left me wondering: How might these apps-on-steroids, used by billions of companies worldwide, change the way we work? Especially if Google fully comes into play and integrates its own generative AI capabilities into Google Workspace? Will AI become as commonplace as the simple spreadsheet in our daily work?

The CES 2023 technology trade show was in full swing in Las Vegas last weekend, drawing large crowds to the largest North American technology trade show party.

On or before CES 2023, I recorded about 80 press events, interviews and sessions. I walked 87,447 steps over five days — or more than 38.81 miles. I wrote 43 stories. I have given two interviews. And moderated a panel. My feet hurt.

There were nearly 3,000 exhibitors this year, up from 1,900 in 2021 and down from 4,000 (in person) in 2020. Here are the 18 things that caught my eye.

Since CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association, it makes perfect sense that it would focus on consumer technology. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t significant business takeaways, particularly around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

That’s especially true in a year when few technologies are as popular as AI and ML, especially when it comes to generative AI, including DALL-E and ChatGPT.

We solicited feedback from vendor experts on the top AI and ML takeaways they saw coming out of CES 2023.

In April 2021 data label service Scale AI had a valuation of $7 billion and a CEO, Alexandr Wang, who was known in Silicon Valley as “the next Zuckerberg.”

But last night, Insider report that the unicorn company had laid off 20% of its 700-person workforce sent shivers down the spines of those who thought AI was generally immune to the current wave of technical layoffs. Especially in this red-hot AI moment where Microsoft is reportedly in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAIand bustling generative AI startups like Jasper and Stability AI boast raises of more than $100 million.

Last year (2022) was an unprecedented year for cybersecurity, for better and for worse. On the plus side, we saw increased use of passwordless and multi-factor authentication (MFA) and zero-trust methods. On the other hand, the cost of data leaks reached an all-time high and we saw the rise of commoditized cybercrime (ransomware-as-a-service) and massive breaches across Twitter, WhatsApp, Rockstar and Uber.

What will we see in 2023? VentureBeat posed this question to several AWS security leaders. Here are their top cybersecurity predictions for 2023.