December 2022

December 2022 announces the ChatGPT era with a bang — evidenced by coverage of building virtual machines inside ChatGPT, Quora's Poe chatbot aggregator launching, and an 'epic AI debate' framing the anxieties heading into 2023. Privacy concerns crystallize, with AI's ability to synthesize realistic images from scraped photos prompting calls to remove personal images from the internet. Technical advances are significant: Stable Diffusion runs natively on Apple Silicon via Core ML, Google's PaLM 540B paper circulates widely, and all major neural network architectures are mapped in a single viral chart. The year closes with a challenge to LLM framings — 'LLMs have not learned our language — we're trying to learn theirs' — and resonant skepticism about whether the breathless excitement around sentience and AGI reflects reality or projection.