[Water Cooler Talk] Tech discovery of the year

Hey guys,

As the year comes to a close, it's time to reminisce a little of what's gone on and what was the most important breakthrough or discovery of this year.

For me, the biggest tech discovery of this year was the "rise of the machines" 😁 AKA the innovations in the field of AI. Since I'm working at a university, the biggest change I've seen is the use of ChatGPT and the rest of them to write text/programs. Even disregarding the academic integrity angle, at this point it's still quite visible when the text is written by ChatGPT and not a person. Unless a lot of time was dedicated to teaching ChatGPT to write like a real person. It keeps astounding me how students think that asking AI to write documents for them is OK.

And it's not just students who use AI, obviously. In different ads and marketing campaigns when I see some key words, I know 99,9% that the text was not written by a human being which makes me less interested in reading it. Because if the person didn't dedicate some of his own time to writing and creating something, why should I waste my time reading it. Besides, you can't be sure that whatever is written is true and not just a "figment of imagination" of a machine (as we sometimes see even here on the Community when there are suggestions to use classes or methods that don't even exist).

My small rant on the subject is done, what are the biggest scientific or technical discoveries of the 2023 for you?