Comment by ThomPete

*First, the macro economic and political:*

- The Ukraine war will either end with Russia withdrawing and gaining a few territories or a coup.

- The US and China will step up the military presence around Taiwan.

- China's covid situation is getting completely out of control. If it doesn't mutate into something dangerous, it will disappear as quickly as it spread.

- AI will become one of the most politicized areas. The discussion will be about bias, copyright, AGI and creativity. - There are voices in AI skepticism, so politicians will try to legislate in the area, especially the EU.

- San Francisco will continue to do away with its dysfunctional progressive legislation.

- The European countries will burn more fossil fuels than in 2022.

- Coal will be the "best performing commodity" (Denmark alone 7 doubled imports of coal in 2022).

- Investments in the green transition will be sharply reduced and several completely shelved.

- The housing market will crash (Already down 10% in the US in 2022).

- Credit card and loan debt will hit an all-time high.

- Savings will hit the lowest point in recent times.

- Energy will become more expensive, which means everything else will become more expensive.

- Most schools will ban AI, some of the more rational ones will implement it into their teaching.

- India will continue to develop economically, socially, technologically and become a power player on an equal footing with China and the USA.

- Most countries will see zero to minus growth (i.e. recession)

- Nuclear power is becoming more popular than ever.

- Many people's pension savings will be greatly reduced.

*And now for the technological/startups related:*

- Venture capital investments in AI-related software are breaking records because investors have total FOMO.

- We will see a bloodbath of companies going bankrupt or being bought as talent acquisitions.

- “What is our AI strategy?” replaces "What is our Big Data Strategy?" as the most important question a company can ask itself.

- Google, one of the biggest investors in AI models and chips, will be one of the companies that will be forced to publish how they intend to use AI while not killing their existing business.

- The number of new search engines based on AI will explode.

- The number of "AI optimized" products will explode.

- By far the AI companies will fail as early as 2023.

- GPT-4 will either be multimodal or have more direct access to the Internet.

- NFT's will continue their popularity in many areas that have not used them before.

- Crypto will finally get clear regulatory rules in the US. - We will see some pretty big advances in bio-technology due to Crisper. Especially cancer research.

- Sam Bankman Fried from FTX will either get life in prison or go completely free.

- Twitter survives despite cutting 70% of the company by asking: “Who is exceptional and who is indispensable?”.

- Blockchain and AI will be the new power couple. They need each other. One provides utility, the other identity.

- Many other companies will do what Musk has done and cut their staff.

- More crashes in the Crypto world.

- Mastodon who?

- Mr. Beast becomes new Twitter CEO.

With this I would like to wish everyone a good 2023 and hope to see many of you around where I come.