My prediction that VR will be as big as the iPhone in 2007 did not look good this year. VR progress has been much slower than anticipated and meta hasn’t really played their cards right. Regardless it’s still 2 years away so a lot can change and some progress was still made.

In terms of AI more progress was made than I had anticipated. Whilst I expected GPT-4 to be out by now, I was blown away by the progress in art generation. I expected it would be a year until open source image generators competed with Dall-E 2 but only a few months after stable diffusion was released and now it’s better than Dall-e 2 in many aspects. I see AI generated art everywhere and I’m just blown away by how quickly it has improved. Self driving has been about where I expected it so nothing really to say there.

UE5 has also been mind blowing. Both ray tracing and polygon rendering has improved a ton with technology like nanite. The games on it look amazing however we’ll have to wait a couple years for games to be developed for it to see its full potential. Definitely higher than my expectations for sure.

Government developments have been about where I expected in most developments (infrastructure, finance etc). Little developments have been made towards AI by most governments. The one big exception was the China chip manufacturing ban by the US government which really took me by surprise. It definitely goes to show that countries such as the US and China have really seen the potential in AI and have begun making changes, even if it’s behind the scenes.

My predictions about hardware developments have roughly been right but I’m still disappointed. Progress in hardware has really slowed down, and if the 4090 has shown us anything it’s that we really are reaching the limit on how efficient we can make transistors. Although this was what I expected I still find it disappointing. Hopefully quantum computers or the like will be viable. If not I still think we’ve got a long way to go on software optimization.

Finally energy use. Due to the war in Ukraine I think many countries have begun focusing on renewable energy more than I predicted. Fusion progress seems to be faster than I expected but I don’t want to get too optimistic because it always seems like progress is being made with no results.

So that’s my predictions for everything. Overall a bit more progress was made than I expected.