Well that was one hell of a year.
As I do each December, it’s time to grade my own homework. And the past twelve months certainly started out well. But unless a certain fascistic presidential candidate has a change of heart in the next few days (he won’t), I’m afraid I didn’t break .500 this year (last year I was smokin’ hot, I must say).
In any case, let’s get to it. Here’s a review of what I predicted, and my take on how it turned out.
- ChatGPT finds a business model. Remember, this prediction came just six weeks post-launch, and given the company’s servers were melting from demand, there was a lot of speculation around whether OpenAI would or even could stand up reliable revenue streams. The company was being compared to early versions of Netscape, Google, and Facebook – and none of those breakouts had real business models in their first year. But OpenAI did in fact find its business model – selling its services to Microsoft, naturally, but also to millions of individual developers and consumers. While profitability is still over the horizon, OpenAI did become – as far as I can tell – the fastest business to a billion-dollar run rate in the history of the Internet. Not bad for year one, even with the goat rodeo at the end. I’d grade myself as getting this one right.
- Google launches a ChatGPT-inspired search interface. In my post covering this prediction, I wrote that “Google will build a novel conversational interface to its flagship Google search application.” Months later, Bard launched as a sandboxed “experiment” (something I also predicted). This pasts Fall, Google put Bard, now powered by its more advanced Gemini model, into wide release. Many, many questions remain about how Google will manage its customer base in relation to Bard and its core search business, but again, I’d say I got this one right.
- Microsoft launches “Enterprise Explorer.” Here’s what I meant by that: “Built, again, from a mashup of OpenAI technology and Microsoft’s Azure compute platform, E2 would address some of ChatGPT’s most annoying problems – its indifference to truth, for example, or the biases inherent to its Web-scale training corpus. The idea would be this: Train a specific ChatGPT instance on just the body of data owned or operated by a particular corporation.” So did they launch this kind of a service? Yes, they did. So far, I’m three for three.
- There’ll be a war between the duopolies of Google/Facebook and Amazon/Apple. OK, maybe after more than 20 years of predictions, I’d learn not to overgeneralize. I mean, there’s always a war between these oligarchs, so…what’s different this time? Well, I predicted that both Apple and Amazon will grow their advertising businesses significantly, stealing share from Meta and Google. And indeed, that’s what happened. Forbes noticed it by April of 2023, and the Epic case said the quiet part out loud about Apple – which makes huge profits from its deal with Google. Beyond that, Apple is already close to a $10 billion annual run rate in its app store advertising business. I predicted a “war” – and in retrospect, I have no idea what that really means. But did Amazon and Apple steal growth from Google and Meta’s advertising business this past year? Absolutely. So I’ll take this one as a win.
- Netflix will triumph. I predicted that by the end of the year – so right about now – the skepticism that prevailed in early 2023 around Netflix’s new advertising business would turn to rapture. I was wrong. Netflix is still finding its footing, and while I think long term, the company will have a big ads business, it didn’t mature as quickly as I expected this year. One of the company’s marquee hires, Jeremi Gorman, left after less than six months on the job, and the new President, Amy Reinhard, penned a pretty uninspiring one-year anniversary post highlighting…. measurement? The company also announced it has 15 million subscribers in their advertising tier, a big number in aggregate, but it’ll need to 10X that figure if it wants to build a truly scale business. We’ll see, but for now, I call this prediction a fail.
- Twitter will rebound. Oh damn, how wrong can one person be? I predicted that Elon would tire of his toy and hire an ads-focused CEO (partial credit, I guess). I also said that “by the end of the year, the stories will about the miraculous rebirth of The Bird, because, well, that’s always been Twitter’s story.” What I didn’t foresee was Space Voldemort replacing the Twitter name with a letter in the alphabet, and turning the company, and the service I once loved, into a toxic cesspool that nearly everyone I respect has abandoned (I left over a year ago). Grade: Abysmal fail, and an abject lesson in not turning hopes into predictions.
- Crypto will go sideways in ’23. Well, I was right for a few months, but then, somehow, the crypto markets shook off all the bad news and … went batshit, rising 85 (Ethereum) to 160 percent (bitcoin). No one seems to be able to predict what’s going to happen in crypto markets, and as of today, I’m going to stay out of that business. Grade: Fail.
- Tesla will continue to tank. If you only read the headlines, you might conclude that I got this one right. After all, this is a company that failed this year in so many ways: Harassment lawsuits, massive recalls, wheels literally falling off. And yet – the damn stock nearly doubled this past year. It’s as if some evil cabal is manipulating the markets so as to preserve Elon’s wealth. As with Twitter and crypto, Tesla is an Elon economy play. So as I did with those, I’ll do with this: I’m bowing out of the Tesla prediction game, and I’ll take the L this year.
- Tech IPOs will make a comeback. Well, you could argue this one both ways. On the one hand, the number of IPOs were up compared to 2022 – with Instacart, Mobileye, Arm, and Klaviyo as notable debuts. But as of today, only Mobileye and Arm are trading above their initial price. And big names like Databricks and Stripe, which were expected to debut this year, opted instead to keep their powder dry. In short, tech IPOs did make a comeback this year, but the market was a bit of a mixed bag. I’d grade this one a push.
- Trump will pull out of the ’24 presidential race. Well shit, if wishes were fishes….I mean, there’s still a week left, right? Grade: Fail.
So that’s it. Five fails, four hits, and one push. A batting average of less than .500. Not my best year, to be sure. But some valuable lessons learned: I’m not a stock picker, crypto is inscrutable, and I need to avoid toxic subjects like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Keep your eyes out for my Predictions 2024, coming in a week or so. Let’s hope we all do better next year.
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