5 Trends of 2023 - Part 1
I want to share 5 trends that I observed in 2023:
Weight Loss Drugs
ChatGPT / AI
Inflation / Recession that never came
Wars / Geo Political
Covid / The End
I will cover first two in this part-1.
#1 Weight Loss Drugs (Ozempic / Mounjaro)
There has been a wave of weight loss drugs in 2023 that made significant impact in the world. These drugs are insulin type medication.
Diabetes Type-2 is a common problem across the world and these drugs not only helped with insulin but also resulted in weight loss by more than 15% which is huge.
There are alternate versions of these drugs being produced on the market that helps even non-diabetic individuals with weight loss.
Leaders:
Downsides:
The drugs are still new in the market and seeing incredible adoption. We have to wait and watch the long term side effects.
There are also reports that folks gain back weight once you stop medication. Is it sustainable for people to take these insulin medication throughout life if the purpose is just weight loss
The drugs are super expensive right now due to their success and demand. I hope these drugs become affordable to more economical countries in Asia and Africa.
#2 ChatGPT and AI
Wow, this has been such a game changer in technology, almost like an iPhone moment back in 2007. I’m amazed how well you can have an engaging conversation with a chat bot. It understands the context, produces answers that are comprehensive and easy to understand.
ChatGPT has been a phenomenal success. I wonder may be they didn’t expect the exponential success, otherwise they would have come up with a better name similar to “iPhone”. This technology is resulting in a lot of competition in the market with new companies and startup eco systems flourishing again.
LLM Model Builders:
ChatGPT - chatbot developed by OpenAI
Bard - AI Collaborator by Google
Anthropic - develops general AI systems and large language models.
LLM Notable Applications:
LangChain - Toolkit to build LLM Applications
Perplexity AI - information discovery and sharing
The unknown in this trend is will it result in sustainable long term applications that make a huge difference in people lives. It will be interesting to watch over the next 2-5 years. There are a lot of opinions in the market on the the kind of seismic shift AI is going to make from making it easy to build applications, making workforce productive and at the same make most of them redundant. Let’s wait and see!
Another thing I’m looking out is the production of consumer hardware with AI as the front face. Will it disrupt the age old iPhone and MacBooks? What is Apple cooking and how will it deal with new threats?
Biggest beneficiary of this trend has been Nvidia which took leap in producing AI chips that are fundamental building blocks to run and execute AI models. A whopping 200% gain in market cap in the last year.