If 2022 was marked by the assaults of the Russian bear, 2023 will suffer the effects of the Chinese dragon’s cough. With the easing of ‘zero Covid’ measures, China braces for a tidal wave of cases – 250 million infections were recorded during the first three weeks of December. This will inevitably lead to a thrombosis of its industrial apparatus and a fall in domestic demand.
For the past week, Tesla factories have been shut down and Foxconn, Apple’s main contractor, has been idling, as have other component makers. As at the start of the pandemic, the West will once again become aware of its dependence on Chinese production.
Apple will be the first to suffer. As explained in a previous column, the iPhone manufacturer has relied on China for almost all of its production. A complex diversification has been initiated since 2019 towards countries such as India or Vietnam, which manufactures certain accessories such as headphones. But more than 90% of iPhone manufacturing remains Chinese. For now, device production in India is only 8% of the total and won’t even reach 20% in 2024. So the interim period is likely to be difficult for Apple to manage.
In the field of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is one of the most salient breakthroughs of the year 2022. The simple and playful interface of this text generator is amazing. Studies have shown that it even passes the Turing test, where a human is no longer able to detect production from a machine. Will ChatGPT replace classic search? No, probably not. Despite all its flaws, a service like Google provides the source of the data, which is essential for judging the relevance of a result. This is not the case with ChatGPT which renders a paragraph, without context or information on its origin. Its use also risks accentuating “confirmation bias”, where one seeks information in order to reinforce one’s own certainties.
In 2023, its successor, GPT-4, 500 times more powerful, will be launched. He will have absorbed even more texts and knowledge and will be able to generate even more connections.
About Twitter, the only certainty is that the chaotic management of its new owner will continue to generate a tsunami of comments, as if this social network with its mediocre and erratic interface were one of the pillars of free expression – which is obviously not the case. Who will Elon Musk choose to take the direction he has promised to yield? Let us simply note that, for SpaceX and Tesla, he knew how to surround himself remarkably well.
TikTok will not end the year the way it started. First, the Chinese platform is now the embodiment of the toxicity of social networks on the mental state of adolescents; in this, it dethrones Instagram (operated by Meta) and Snapchat with an algorithm that monetizes psychological distress. Equally serious in the eyes of the US government, the presumptions of personal data leaks to China are becoming more and more pressing. TikTok is being squeezed by the two major planetary digital regulators, the US Department of Justice and the European Commission with its two flagship regulations on digital services and markets. In the United States, one of the options that is resurfacing is the sale by ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, of the American activities of the platform to a national player in order to better control it.
Finally, will a “super-app” see the light of day in 2023? We lend Microsoft the intention to develop a mobile application combining instant messaging, social network, payment system, trading platform, like WeChat in China. Elon Musk also dreams of building the same kind of universal application using the backbone and audience of Twitter, but he has burned his vessels with the permanent psychodrama of recent weeks. More generally, the image of social networks is deteriorating in Western public opinion and, regardless of the operator, building a multi-service application requires above all restoring trust in these platforms which have methodically destroyed it.
