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2023 was a year of rapid technological development, with artificial intelligence (AI) being a key focus. This wave of AI innovation saw the rise of new tech leaders, as well as the re-emergence of established Silicon Valley figures.

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, was one of the most talked-about figures in the tech world in 2023. Altman, who is Jewish, previously served as president of Y Combinator, a prestigious American startup accelerator that has helped launch companies like Airbnb and Stripe.

In November 2023, nearly a year after ChatGPT's release, GPT-4 was launched. The introduction of the GPT Store model led to comparisons to Apple's ecosystem, and it was seen by some as a historic shift in the AI landscape.

However, GPT-4 also triggered a major scandal at OpenAI, with Altman being ousted by the board of directors without his knowledge. The board's decision shocked the tech world, and it led to increased scrutiny of other OpenAI executives, including President and Chairman Greg Brockman, Chief Technology Officer Ilya Sutskever, and Chief Scientist Mira Murati. These three executives, along with Altman, form OpenAI's core four-person team.

Brockman is one of OpenAI's co-founders. Before co-founding OpenAI, he served as CTO and co-founder of Stripe, a digital payments startup. When he left Stripe, the company had grown from a two-person project to a $20 billion company.

Mira Murati, who worked at Tesla and was in charge of developing ChatGPT and DALL-E at OpenAI, was praised by Time magazine as “the creator of ChatGPT” and was the main contributor to the commercialization of OpenAI’s research results.

Sutskever was a student of “the father of deep learning” Geoffrey Hinton and also worked as a scientist at Google Brain. He is a bona fide genius. According to foreign media, Sutskever thought that Altman’s fast commercialization came at the expense of potential AI safety issues, which led to this “coup”.

In the AI wave led by ChatGPT, Satya Nadella, the third leader who brought Microsoft back to the top, is one of the undeniable winners. With the cooperation with OpenAI, Microsoft launched a number of innovative AI products and services this year, such as New Bing, Copilot, and AI self-developed chips. As of December 29, Microsoft’s market value reached 2.79 trillion US dollars, and the company’s stock price has increased by more than 57% this year.

Another big winner who has to be mentioned is Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, because Nvidia’s high-performance AI chips and software have become the “currency of the AI era”. As of December 29, Nvidia’s market value reached 1.22 trillion US dollars, and the company’s increase was as high as 239% this year. According to Bloomberg, Huang’s personal wealth also reached 44 billion US dollars, an increase of more than 30.2 billion US dollars since the beginning of the year.

Besides AI, “room-temperature superconductivity” also sparked heated discussion in the field of technology this year. Ranga Dias is one of the most controversial scientists behind this topic. In March, Dias, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, and his team published a paper in Nature claiming that they had created a new material that could achieve superconductivity at room temperature, causing a sensation. It is worth noting that a paper with the same title published by Dias’ team in 2020 was retracted by Nature, and therefore, the industry was also full of doubts and criticisms about their research results. And finally, the paper on “room-temperature superconductivity” published in March was retracted by Nature magazine again on November 7.

Shifting our focus from the field of technology to the macro-political field, the changes of the governor of the Bank of Japan and the speaker of the US House of Representatives this year also attracted global attention.

In April, Kazuo Ueda succeeded Haruhiko Kuroda as the governor of the Bank of Japan. Ueda was a policy board member of the Bank of Japan from 1999 to 2005, and studied under economist Stanley Fischer. After taking office, Ueda maintained the Bank of Japan’s ultra-loose policy, but repeatedly explained the possible measures that the Bank of Japan would take after ending the negative interest rate policy.

In October, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Speaker McCarthy. McCarthy became the first speaker of the House of Representatives in US history to be impeached, and also the person with the shortest term as speaker of the House of Representatives since 1876, serving only 269 days. Since McCarthy took office, there have been huge differences between the two parties in Congress on issues such as reducing federal government spending. His impeachment vote also highlighted the increasingly fierce and escalating contradictions within the Republican Party. Three weeks after McCarthy was impeached, Republican congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana was elected as the new speaker of the House. Johnson, 51, is a constitutional lawyer who has only been a congressman for six years and has never served as the chairman of any committee in the House. Therefore, he was also called by the media as “the most inexperienced speaker of the House in more than 140 years in the United States”.

In 2023, the world also lost several heavyweights, which was lamentable.

In June, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi died in Milan at the age of 86. Berlusconi served as Italy’s prime minister three times, and was also a successful businessman. He not only ventured into real estate development, but also built Italy’s “media empire” with his own hands, and once controlled the Italian football club AC Milan, creating a glorious red and black dynasty.

On November 28, Berkshire Hathaway announced the death of its vice chairman Charlie Munger, who was 99 years old. Munger was Buffett’s most trusted ally, whose investment philosophy was widely respected. He was also Buffett’s powerful adviser on investment and business decisions. 

A day later, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also died at his home in Connecticut, at the age of 100. As the most famous diplomat in the US after World War II, Kissinger made outstanding contributions in promoting China-US diplomatic contacts, mediating the Middle East situation, and many other aspects. Normalizing China-US relations was the highlight of Kissinger’s diplomatic career, and China-US relations became his focus of work for more than half a century. Throughout his life, Kissinger visited China more than 100 times, and deserved to be called “an old friend of the Chinese people”.