What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?

Something I'm personally excited about: colour e-ink displays. There are a few decent colour e-ink tablets on the market already, for surprisingly low prices ($400-500). So far the colour reproduction and refresh rate is still somewhat suboptimal, but development appears to be progressing rapidly. I predict that in a few years there will be little reason to get a conventional tablet over an e-ink one, at least for the “reading and taking notes” use case.

Commodity RISCV chips. Some of these have just entered mass production, such as the CH32V003 (10 cents each in 1k quantities).

https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun

Fully open source stack!

Grab the below eval board and peck around: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005269690018.html

Also see here for awesome writeup on the BL602 chip using the Nuttx RTOS: https://lupyuen.github.io/articles/nuttx

WebGPU. It’ll be live in Chromium stable this Thursday and will be the biggest step change for browser-based GPU since the original WebGL.

1. lots of innovation in ICE engines is getting close to production. Cleaner, more efficient etc. This is important even while the industry is moving to EVs.

2. Bambu Labs leapfrogged prosumer 3D printing by 5-10 years. Their printers are becoming the de-facto standard. This will enable all sorts of startups for the next decade.

3. Most iPhones now have a 3D scanner + AI-aided software to accurately scan your body and generate designs is becoming more mature. See also 2.

4. material sciences both new discoveries and new applications for 50 years old discoveries

Now that the NFT and Meta clown cars have crashed, metaverse work is quietly plugging along. It's a niche, but it may be a Roblox/Fortnite sized niche.

We've all pretty much forgotten about AR/VR

But Apple's going to be launching their headset next month

One of the questions I've been asking is we've basically had physical servers -> VM -> cloud -> container orchestration on about a decade long cadence. So what's next--especially considering you can argue a lot of the low-level architectural things haven't really changed during that period. But, then, perhaps architectural details don't matter a lot at this point relative to things like AI/ML. Even WASM is mostly in the weeds.

Heat pumps and smart grid. Both relatively boring but very impactful for climate.

like usual, basic php + mysql apps making money . they will never die

I'm excited about Windows 95, the world wide web, the potential of the world wide web for e-commerce, CD-ROM-based games like Myst, PDAs, digital cameras, 3D graphics and animation.

Sorry, I'm hallucinating.

Antiaging technology, like the research David Sinclair has done to reverse macular degeneration in mice, and more recently in monkeys, by using 3 of the Yamanaka factors.

It feels like there are two new cloud technologies arriving: generative ai & quantum computing. On the consumer side, there is consumer level demand (<$100/mo) for text-to-image and video synthesizer type playgrounds. But on the enterprise side, particularly around Wall Street & Gov/Defense, there is real thirst from the pointy heads in suits for new innovations like cloud KEM & "quantum resistant vaults". Even though these services havn't really been implemented as products by the Big Six cloud providers. And those enterprise quantum cloud products could easily fetch a premium (>$1000/mo) I hope ;)

Introducing post-quantum Cloudflare Tunnel

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-tunnel/

New databases.

Is probably the most "under the radar" of all. Is interesting how little attention you get from people about this stuff (when talking about implementation or internals).

Is like, literally, only make a splash AFTER at-minimun you have something competitive with a major stablished product.

But you get more "views" talking about compilers than talking about DBs!

(except when talking about compilers that use the relational model. I probably should rebrand https://tablam.org as a "lisp"! -no accurate, but whatever-)

* I also pithy anyone doing a new OS, now that is crickets!

I just started hearing about WASI. I think I've been living under a rock.

This: https://ig.ft.com/quantum-computing

Stuff that's actually innovative.

ChatGPT knows a lot about existing tech - even more than people who think they're pretty steeped in it (including myself here) - but inventive stuff that doesn't show up after a bit of googlefu, it's much less helpful (even useless).

So great assistant, great rhythm section but falls down as lead.

For now, anyway (and open question, for how long?)

I'm personally excited about precision autonomous agriculture. Think about drones 'sniping' pests with tiny doses of pesticide instead of farmers spraying entire fields.

There are a lot of wireless communication improvements related to WiFi and 5G. I think this opens a lot of doors, especially around low power apps.

Also, somewhat related: secure anonymous data exchange has a lot of cool possible applications beyond health exposure tracking.

Very selfishly - distributed compute. Not decentralized, distributed.

Compute and data are being created and run everywhere, we need platforms that understand how to use it and get insights without (or before) moving it.

Our contribution: https://github.com/bacalhau-project/bacalhau (think Kubernetes but built for the distributed world).

Disclosure: I co-founded the Bacalhau Project

All the private fusion companies making very interesting progress.

https://www.helionenergy.com/ https://cfs.energy/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/ https://tae.com/

Insert below; jokes about its being 25 years away, and comments about how it will never work etc

Drone tech, satellite tech, phone applications for war (I assume), and bringing war to social media are actively changing the state of warfare as we know it in Ukraine.

The idea that violence isn't necessarily bad and can also be a force for good is something I think will change the tech landscape. A lot of those people at google who said no to killer robots are probably having second thoughts, being one of those types of people, it certainly modulated my opinion.

Battery tech

Display panel tech

Silicon photonics

A lot of smart people in my network (infrastructure stuff) lately doing things around data on kubernetes and data / storage orchestration.

Miniaturization of VR headsets is finally a thing. Google the Bigscreen VR headset compared to a valve index.

Mars Sample Return going through PDR.

Intrinsic AI making a product announcement in two weeks.

Deepmind collaborating with Robotis implementing deep RL on the robocup humanoids to play soccer at the next level.

https://cebra.ai/ this

HTML

Neurotech

Micro-LED, maybe. Apple is working on using it on the Apple Watch, and if that pans out, likely on larger devices.

Kubernetes Doesn’t get a lot of publicity /s

Graph Neural Networks and Geometric Deep Learning

text-to-speech

mojojs :D .... and vanilla everything.

compute in memory

AT Protocol?

Biology and energy.