A data-driven look back on 2023

One year of writing about data, trying to understand technology and thinking about what's to come in the future.

To those of you that were at the edge of their seats waiting for last week’s newsletter - apologies! I spent a lovely off-the-grid weekend in upstate New York with lots of friends and enjoyed some true R&R. To embrace that, I decided to postpone for a final wrap up on the year to go out today as I look back on an incredible 2023.

Day to Data is closing out its first year! I remember nervously posting my first article in January and having only one goal - just keep writing. And looking back, I’m proud to say I’ve done just that. In a world inundated with information, it can be hard to feel like you’re not just contributing to the noise. I’m still figuring out what resonates best with readers and how I can add value, but I’m excited about the challenges along the way.

A few numbers on the year —

• Day to Data: 48 posts, with a 60%+ open rate!

• Spotify: 77k minutes of music listened to

• Strava: 1700+ miles run and a 16 min marathon PR

• And 1 new job!

We’ll celebrate the end of the year with some of my thoughts on what’s happened in the past year and what’s to come in 2024. And as for Day to Data - I’ll be pivoting to a bi-weekly release of articles. I’ll keep writing about basics of data science and exciting use cases, while exploring additional avenues of writing. It will be a journey! More fun facts guaranteed :)

Data is still the new oil.

In 2006, mathematician Clive Humby was credited with saying that data is the new oil. Like oil, data’s potential isn’t when it is in its raw form - it’s the limitless opportunities for data once it is cleaned, formatted, tidied up, and reshaped into something even more powerful. This past year, ushered in new era of what data can do. Academics, founders, professionals and lay people are seeing the power of data in their lives more today than ever before. While there is some pessimism about using data as a catalyst for acceleration, we’ve seen some incredible things be built, shared, launched and updated this year - much thanks to data.

The world is more online than ever.

Per Cloudflare, global Internet traffic grew 25%, in line with peak 2022 growth. While this number may seem like we’re spending more time online than ever, it also shows that more people are online than ever. Starlink traffic more than tripled, with 4,200 satellites powering their high speed internet access virtually anywhere. The most popular internet service of 2023 was Google.

Starlink on a camping trip. Source: Outside

The venture landscape is changing.

Seed investments have been ”remarkably resilient of late”, per Carta. The median deal size has been $3 million. Series A investments are on the rise, with a median round size of $9.6M in Q3 2023, the highest value since Q3 2022. Series B and C rounds saw slight upticks, but later stage (D & E) fell. IPOs are still quiet. Instacart and Klaviyo were buzzy, but ultimately calm IPOs. Many speculated they’d open the floodgates, but instead they left the IPO market looking milder than ever. Both stocks are now performing 15-20% below their initial share price. Investors will continue to look for new exit opportunities. I think private equity buyout and M&A will be on the rise in 2024.

Where I’m excited to look for investments in the new year? New software & data infrastructure to support fast and secure multimodal model training. Platforms using AI to increase efficiencies in the warehouse. And software to support new hardware being built to change the energy industry (with a personal interest in hydrogen energy!).

An electrolyzer from Electric Hydrogen, the green hydrogen startup that raised $380M in Series C funding this year, becoming the first hydrogen unicorn.

Consumers are spending big money.

Consumer spend on Black Friday was up 7.5% from 2022 to $9.8B, according to CNN. Expectations for consumer spend in the US overall was 0.5% for 2023. Instead, we saw a 2.4% increase in consumer expenditures in 2023, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis. USPS has shipped 11M packages this holiday season to date. That recession many folks expected never really came.

And technical innovation saw step-change growth

Taking a glance at the visual below, we saw an incredible growth in the size of large language models. GPT-4 has an estimated 1T+ parameters. Amazon’s LLM that has yet to be released, Olympus, is expected to have 2T parameters. Google’s Gemini has an unclear number of parameters, but is expected to be large and outperform GPT-4, perhaps by a lot.

AI aside, we’re seeing some really amazing technology in healthcare and energy. Take nuclear fusion for example. Just this month, there was reports that the team that created the first net-positive nuclear fusion reaction was able to repeat that reaction three more times this year. While the feat may seem small, it is a huge step for finding new energy options for our future.

The chamber where temps reach 100M degrees and unimaginable pressure is created to create an environment for the nuclear fusion reaction.

We are in for an exciting 2024!

There’s a lot to look forward to in 2024. Something I’d love to see is a continuing education and transparency on the rapidly evolving technical landscape that’s happening. That could be more companies moving to open source projects, or more consumer-facing education around tech behind products. Continuing to empower the individual about their data and how it’s being used. Peeling back the curtains a bit.

Some of my more technical, higher level predictions for 2024 include…

1. Open source will consistently outperform GPT-4

2. AI avatars will still not catch on, like Meta’s (perhaps they’ll even shut this down, as predicted by Platformer)

3. Mixture of experts models will become commonplace, like Mistal’s new model

4. More models will be natively multimodal, like Google’s Gemini

5. The parameter size of the largest models will plateau, and the new victory will go to those who can build the smallest models, which will sit on our phones and tablets

6. Novel technology will be build to enable a dramatic reduction in hallucinations

I’ll stop there. One last bit for today’s article below…

My holiday reading list

For all the folks using the holidays to catch up on that growing list of bookmarks, here’s what I’ll be reading over the break. **Warning - this is all technical and nerdy!

1. The Big Short by Michael Lewis (is a link needed here…? I know I’m late to the game!)

2. Why Every Company Will be an Energy Company from Meera Clark at Redpoint

3. We Need More Women Founders on Offense by Ashley Mayer

4. Long Live High-Performance Computing by Justin Selig at Eclipse

5. Building RAG-based LLM Applications for Production by Goku Mojandas and Philipp Mortiz

6. Theory of Mind Might Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models by Michal Kosinski

And for a final read, the most viewed Day to Data post of the year! Unsurprisingly, my piece on Silicon Valley and compression algorithms came in at #1.

That’s a wrap!

I’ll be back January 6th with the first Day to Data of 2024. I’ll take some much needed rest to end out probably the busiest and most eventful year of my life. Thanks for being a part of it!