Top 5 stories of the week: Nvidia and OpenAI updates, 2023 predictions for cybersecurity, and more

As we enter December, marking the year’s end and begin to look ahead to what’s on the horizon for the tech industry as we approach 2023, experts across a range of companies have unveiled their predictions, insights and even a glance at up-and-coming innovations.

Even in the midst of a possible recession, it’s clear that artificial intelligence (AI) experts expect innovation to continue — especially when it comes to generative AI. In fact, this week, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia shared insights on the extensive use cases generative AI may offer for the metaverse, including the growing demand to fill the virtual world with 3D and graphic assets. 

Relatedly, OpenAI, the company behind generative AI tools DALL-E and GPT-3, noted this week that it’s working on a new AI-powered language model which will become part of the GPT-3 family. Reportedly the model, GPT-3.5, will be able to handle more complex instructions and in turn produce higher quality results. 

AI advances in the medical field also made the news this week. Nvidia announced it’s working to better integrate AI models into clinical workflows and also aiming to bring simplicity to medical imaging  — an area that Harvard Medical School’s AI research team is also working on separately. 

With the many technological advances across industries comes discussions about cybersecurity vulnerabilities as well. 2022 was a year of many wins and also concerns for IT and security professionals. Just as a Twitter API breach exposed the information of 5.4 million users, which was recently made available for free by hackers — security continues to be an ever-changing landscape with rapidly shifting targets. To gain insight into the biggest threats, VentureBeat spoke to 31 CISOs t from companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft, AWS and dozens of others about what they are paying close attention to heading into the new year.

Here’s more from our top 5 tech stories of the week:

1. How generative AI could create assets for the metaverse
   Jensen Huang, CEO of AI and graphics chipmaker Nvidia, believes that generative AI will be transformational and it’s just getting started. One of its biggest applications could be with the metaverse, which has huge demands for content as developers need to fill out virtual worlds with 3D assets. Companies like Stable Diffusion, Promethean AI and Ludo AI are using these technologies to automatically generate artwork and other assets for gaming and metaverse applications.

   Many metaverse companies are hoping that generative AI will help provide the resources to help them build out their worlds. Huang believes you will see progress when you enter more and more prompts — such as text to flesh out a concept — and the concept imagery gets better and better.

1. OpenAI debuts ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 series as GPT-4 rumors fly 
   As GPT-4 rumors fly around NeurIPS 2022 this week in New Orleans (including whispers that details about GPT-4 will be revealed there), OpenAI has managed to make plenty of news in the meantime.

   On Monday, the company announced a new model in the GPT-3 family of AI-powered large language models (LLMs), text-davinci-003, part of what it calls the “GPT-3.5 series,” that reportedly improves on its predecessors by handling more complex instructions and producing higher-quality, longer-form content.

1. Twitter API security breach exposes 5.4 million users’ data
   In July, this year, cybercriminals began selling the user data of more than 5.4 million Twitter users on a hacking forum after exploiting an API vulnerability disclosed in December 2021. 

   Recently, a hacker released this information for free, just as other researchers reported a breach affecting millions of accounts across the EU and U.S.

1. The future of AI and medical imaging, from Nvidia to Harvard
   Nvidia announced this week at the annual meeting of the Radiology Society of North America (RSNA) that MONAI, an open-source medical-imaging AI framework accelerated by Nvidia, is making it easier to integrate AI models into clinical workflows with MONAI Application Packages (MAPs), delivered through MONAI Deploy.

   Nvidia and King’s College London introduced MONAI in April 2020 to simplify AI medical imaging workflows. This helps transform raw imaging data into interactive digital twins to improve analysis or diagnostics, or guide surgical instruments. The development and adoption of the platform now has over 600,000 downloads, half of these in the last six months.

1. 31 CISOs share their security priorities and predictions for 2023
   2022 was a pivotal year in the cyberthreat landscape. Securing the software supply chain and the open-source software ecosystem, implementing zero trust, and educating employees about the risks of social engineering and phishing attempts are just some of the areas that CISOs are evaluating to mitigate potential risks.

   Executives from Google, Microsoft, AWS, IBM and more told VentureBeat what they predict for the cybersecurity sector in the coming year and what is top of mind for them going forward.