The top 10 tech stories of 2023

The top technology stories of 2023 highlight fundamental changes in culture and geopolitics as well as tech itself: It’s clear that generative AI will affect all aspects of technology and society, while geopolitical tensions are sparking cybersecurity attacks globally. General unease about the dominance of big tech, meanwhile, is pushing regulators to get tougher on mopolistic business practices and multibillion-dollar mergers.

Fired! Rehired! Sam Altman’s ouster and return to OpenAI

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The ouster of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI, which sparked the modern era of generative AI when it launched ChatGPT a year earlier, was the tech industry shocker of the year. After the board issued a mysterious statement on November 17 saying that it had fired Altman for not being “consistently candid,” Microsoft announced that it would hire Altman and any other OpenAI employees who wanted to follow him out the door — which turned out to be almost all of them. OpenAI backed down and rehired Altman.

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As VR headset adoption grows, privacy issues could emerge

Head and hand motion data gathered from virtual reality (VR) headsets could be as effective at identifying individuals as fingerprints or face scans, research studies have shown, potentially compromising user privacy when interacting in immersive virtual environments.

Two recent studies by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, showed how data gathered by VR headsets could be used to identify individuals with a high level of accuracy, and potentially reveal a host of personal attributes, including height, weight, age, and even marital status, according to a Bloomberg report Thursday.

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