We worked hard this year to help tease apart what was hype/ what was real when it came to the buzz, to the signal vs the noise when it came to tech trends in the news this year (what a year!) on our podcast show “16 Minutes”. To do so, we went beyond the headlines, shared first-person analysis directly from experts, and also often shared frameworks for putting tech trends in context — and all in 16ish minutes or so (along with occasional 2x explainer episodes;).
But the show also goes well beyond the news cycle into the long arc of tech trends, helping orient where we are, since innovation plays out in phases; discussing which are leaps, and which were incremental advances, is a big part of what we discuss on the show. And this year, we covered a diverse range of tech trends beyond the coronavirus pandemic, a veritable ABCs from algorithms and AI in bio to CRISPR and digital health; from gaming and GPUs (and semiconductors) to healthcare rules and identity online to section 230 and oh so much more.
So, consider this list of top 16 episodes of 16 Minutes your curated summary of 2020 tech trends-in-the-news, explained. But also consider it your primer for understanding the future: where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going… And if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to “16 Minutes from a16z” wherever you get your podcasts!
While much of the news covered the political dance between the various players around divesting the popular video-sharing app TikTok in the U.S. (given security concerns and China), we covered the key algorithm that powers the app — as well as the trends of “creativity network effects”, “algorithm friendly design”, and where we are on the future of video.
This summer, Open AI released private access to its API, which included some of the technical achievements behind GPT-3, the pre-trained machine-learning model optimized for a variety of natural language processing tasks. The viral sharing of resulting screenshots was soon described as “TikTok videos for nerds”. So why the excitement? How do we know how good it is or isn’t; is it ready for practical use; and how do we know the difference between “looks like” a toy and “is” a toy (especially given that many innovations may start out so). And where are we, really, with artificial general intelligence here?
There’s no question that there was a “pandemic effect” when it came to gaming this year, but people who hadn’t played games before (or were coming back to games after years) is part of what contributed to the online multiplayer game Among Us becoming a viral phenomenon. But that alone does not news make; a major politician livestream-played it, too, further mainstreaming such gaming… and livestreaming itself contributed to the who, how, and why now for a game that suddenly became very popular but has actually been around since 2018. What does it mean for the future of social?
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued their final rules to help increase price transparency in (what’s been described by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ secretary as) a “shadowy system where prices are hidden”. So we covered the specifics of, and the impact of, the rules on consumers and on various industry players — hospitals, group health plans, health insurance issuers — as well as the gap (and opportunities) between mandate and implementation. The rules go into effect January 2021… but the deadlines go through 2024. Will we finally have price transparency, and be able to compare and “shop” for healthcare?
Going beyond the headlines of the potential merger, we focused on the longer history of computing innovation — and deeper industry questions and tech trends — behind Nvidia’s (maker of GPUs among other things) announcement of its intent to acquire Arm (provider of silicon IP for system-on-chips inside billions of devices). Questions such as: “what about channel conflict” and where is the value in the hardware/software/firmware stack? Wherefore semiconductors, Intel, and Apple — especially given trends such as cloud-native, mobile-first, “ML inside”, and edge computing?
The news of this merger was considered a big deal not just because of the public markets dollars involved, but because it’s aimed at creating “the first true health tech giant“, an end-to-end digital health platform at scale. However, the scale and opportunity in healthcare is so massive that this is just a drop in the bucket of what’s out there. So where are we, really, when it comes to the broader category here; what’s the taxonomy of key trends and shifts involved such as telehealth/ telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and virtual care?
This year, the FDA approved the first-ever videogame to be legally marketed and prescribed as a medicine — specifically, for 8-12 year olds with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD. So where does that fit in the broader category of “digital therapeutics” — which have proven to be effective as therapeutics — and what IS a digital therapeutic, really? What are the implications for value-based pricing, regulation, and where does real-world evidence come in? [see also related episode on Journal Club for more on the clinical trial data here: “Therepeutic Videogame on Trial“]
Messaging games built on HTML5 and “mini programs” or apps-within-apps merge the key trends of mobile, social, and cloud gaming on phones. Could Snapchat therefore be a serious contender in the “cloud gaming” wars, coming at it from the low end of the market, as in classic disruption theory? From social-first to identity and expression to AR filters and more, how could Snap Minis and the like extend gaming modes and monetization?