Top 5 Stories of the Week: Visions of AI and Security Dance in Readers' Heads

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While others were shopping and decorating for the holidays, VentureBeat readers haven't been watching Christmas this week. Instead, they were consuming two-key coverage, as evidenced by our 5 Most Important Articles of the Week: AI and Security.

Sharon Goldman's coverage of ChatGPT and generative AI made it to the top two spots on the most-read list. Goldman spoke to Rowan Curran of Forrester Research about how and why ChatGPT is having an iPhone moment. Like the iPhone did for the smartphone, ChatGPT is changing public consciousness around AI - generative AI, in particular.

Goldman also reflects on his first calendar year at VentureBeat and the deluge of news in areas ranging from generative AI to AI legislation. Find out how Goldman learned to stop worrying and love AI.

Even during the holiday season, IT managers can't sleep on security, as evidenced by the traffic Tim Keary and Louis Columbus have generated with their prediction stories. Keary looked at Google and Microsoft's cybersecurity forecasts, and Columbus looked at security spending forecasts for 2023 and why zero trust and cloud security top the list.

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Here are the top 5 stories for the week of December 19.

Is it possible to compare this moment in the evolution of generative AI to any other technological development? According to Rowan Curran, AI/ML analyst at Forrester Research, it does.

"The only thing I could compare it to was the iPhone release," he told VentureBeat. Apple's iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it buried the competition with its touchscreen, ease of use, and the introduction of apps that put a whole computing experience in our pockets. The release of the original iPhone in January 2007, followed by the launch of the App Store in July 2008, ushered in a period of historic technological change, Curran explained - when the general public learned that there was a universe of creativity and applications that he could work with.

It was my first week at VentureBeat, in mid-April. OpenAI had just released the newest iteration of its text-to-image generator, DALL-E 2; our AI editor, Kyle Wiggers, had switched to TechCrunch before I could choose his brains, and I was freaking out. I belatedly realized how little I understood about the last decade of advancements in AI, from machine learning (ML) and computer vision to natural language processing (NLP). Every beat I've covered has had a learning curve, of course. But the pace of the AI ​​felt like Mount Everest.

It's no secret that cybercrime is a growing industry. Last year, the FBI estimated that Internet crime cost $6.9 billion. The worst news is that Google's cybersecurity forecast for 2023 predicts that this evil economy will only continue to grow and diversify.

Sometimes the threat landscape looks bleak, but it also fosters greater collaboration between vendors and organizations. At least that's what Microsoft security officials are suggesting in their 2023 cybersecurity predictions. VentureBeat recently reached out to some of Microsoft's top security officials and researchers, who shared their 2023 predictions. p>

Current forecasts for cybersecurity spending in 2023 reinforce some of the key trends for 2022. Gartner predicts that Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) will be the fastest growing network security market segment in the world. world. These are predictions...