VCs hunt for work horses, tech founder-CEOs lose their clout, and AI gets multisensory: Here are LinkedIn News’ biggest tech predictions for 2023.

Welcome to LinkedIn News Tech Stack, which brings you news and insights about the founders, investors, companies and trends on the cutting edge of emerging technology.

Click subscribe to be notified of future editions and follow me on LinkedIn for other tech updates.

As always, let me know if you have ideas or feedback on something that could be a fit by sending me an InMail. And if you see a story that interests you, be sure to join the conversation.?

Zooming In

A deep-dive into one big theme or news story every week.?

2022 was not a year for the faint of heart. While parts of the world welcomed easing pandemic restrictions, many were jolted by record inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and repeated reminders that the consequences of climate change aren’t coming – they’re already here.

The past year also made clear how the global community can band together, with new commitments to protect our natural world, efforts to aid those displaced by war and the delivery of close to 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to areas in need across the world.?

It showed us that, yes, our challenges grow more daunting by the day, but we can rise to them. So what can we expect for the coming year?

Every year, LinkedIn News polls its editors, community of creators and Top Voices across industries for the Big Ideas that they believe will define the year ahead. Here are our predictions for technology:

? The age of the tech CEO hero will come to an end ?

Somewhere between the late aughts and early 2010s, Silicon Valley founders began to acquire a demigod-like status. Tech founder-CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Uber’s Travis Kalanick and WeWork’s Adam Neumann rose to prominence on the exuberant backing of investors — and people readily followed.

Young graduates entering the economy in the aftermath of the 2008 recession found promise in their paths, and these young billionaires became heroes, lionized in film, TV and business school case studies.

As our trust in government and media eroded, the clout of the tech CEO only grew. They were connecting the world to the internet, espousing liberal values, backing gay marriage and defending democracy. Their stock kept climbing and their companies’ headcounts swelled.

But now, as the economy roils, the illusion that tech companies (and their founders) will save us has shattered. Zuckerberg may stand by his convictions about the metaverse, but he laid off 11,000 Meta employees this fall in the company's first massive downsizing. Elon Musk swears he knows how to fix Twitter, but he cut half the staff the week that he became CEO and thousands more subsequently resigned. His erratic business moves have put a question mark on Twitter’s very existence.

As Jessi Hempel and I write, Silicon Valley’s chiefs appear out of touch. Today, Edelman’s Trust Barometer reveals that people still look up to business leaders, but they are largely disappointed with their leadership. And so, the era of the tech founder-CEO is over.?

The upside here? Without techstars to lionize, many of us may embrace grassroots solutions to the problems ahead. Perhaps it’s time we become our own heroes.

?? VCs will stop hunting unicorns and start searching for work horses ??

When venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” in 2013 to describe startups that had bagged valuations upward of $1 billion, the distinction was as rare as the mythical creature itself. But somewhere in the mid 2010s, unicorns became a dime a dozen.??

Driven by early gains, VCs shoveled vast amounts of cash toward founders and companies that didn’t always deserve the hype. Some unicorns — WeWork, Theranos, FTX — imploded spectacularly, erasing tens of billions of dollars of value.

But with borrowing costs rising along with economic uncertainty, Silicon Valley investors are now reluctant to place such fantastical bets. The message VCs are delivering to startups about the year ahead is clear: The era of excess is over, and founders should put aside their unicorn dreams and instead aspire to create sturdy work horses that can survive troubled times.

“We’re seeing a reset,” said veteran investor Alan Patricof. Founders should not “get caught up with the psychological burden of their previous valuations and be realistic about expectations.”

Funding is already slowing. Only 25 unicorn companies were born in the third quarter of 2022, according to the venture capital research firm CB Insights , five times less than the same period in 2021.?

“We’re back to basics,” Arif Janmohamed of Lightspeed told me. “It’s an opportunity to partner with resilient entrepreneurs who are hiring missionaries to join them to build something special over the next decade, as opposed to mercenaries who are looking to get rich in one or two years.”

?? AI will gain multiple "senses" ???

Over the past few years, artificial intelligence has transformed from an academic curiosity to a form of technology that is redefining how people work and businesses operate across industries.?

Nurses are using AI to keep tabs on patients whose health is likely to deteriorate, and investors are using it to adjust investment portfolios. It even played a critical role in the development of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.?

What’s next? As Scott Olster and I write, AI will grow more intuitive and increasingly use multiple “senses” at once. Multi-modal AI applications will allow AI systems to process audio, visual and language data in combination with and in relation to each other. A tool like DALL-E, which can generate original art based on text prompts, is just an early example of this approach.?

Expect multi-modal AI to take off in new applications in the coming years, allowing AI systems to analyze data and the environment in highly sophisticated, nuanced ways. In medicine, multi-modal AI could examine a combination of patient imaging and histories, and data from biosensors to craft diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

The transition to multi-modal systems will also give AI even more creative power than it has today. “It’s like Netflix creating a whole new film based on your preferences, versus just surfacing recommendations,” according to Madrona Venture Group’s Matt McIlwain.

Check out the full list here for more: https://lnkd.in/eUr_RXaE

What other Big Ideas do you think will emerge in 2023? Share your thoughts by commenting on the newsletter or write your own post using #BigIdeas2023.

TechTok?

Catch up on the tech headlines you may have missed this week and what people are saying about them, and join valuable member conversations on LinkedIn.

• 苹果 is beta testing an optional feature that will offer users end-to-end encryption for most of their iCloud data, the company announced Wednesday. The enhanced protection, called Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, will be rolled out in the U.S. by the end of the year.
• 谷歌 is combining the teams responsible for its Waze and Maps products, in a bid to keep costs down amid an advertising slowdown and continued economic uncertainty. This was a long time coming, as I explain in this post.?
• 亚马逊 has begun offering some users $2 a month to let the e-commerce giant monitor their phone traffic. Amazon says it wants to personalize ads and surface better products, but privacy advocates are skeptical.
• Speaking of Amazon, shoppers trying to check items off their holiday lists on the retailer’s site were thwarted by a rare outage Wednesday. Outages can be costly for Amazon, especially during the holiday shopping season.?
• A new AI-powered chatbot called ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm. Over a million people have registered to use the OpenAI chatbot since it went live last week, CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter Monday. But admiration is battling suspicions that the bot might be "the beginning of the end of all white-collar knowledge work."

Movers and Shakers

Here’s keeping tabs on key executives on the move and other big pivots in the tech industry. Please send me personnel moves within emerging tech.

• After Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor announced that he was leaving the enterprise giant, a string of other executive departures have followed in the past week, including Tableau CEO Mark T. Nelson , Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Slack CPO Tamar Yehoshua .
• Amazon is adding four members to its senior leadership team or the S-Team, CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday. These include VP of Amazon Music Steve Boom ; VP of Device Software and Services Robert Williams ; VP of Worldwide Last Mile Udit Madan ; and VP of Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Candi Castleberry
• Apple has quietly hired mobile advertising pioneer Vishal Gurbuxani, MS to build a new ad-buying platform, according to Business Insider.
• New York-based venture capital firm Lux Capital has promoted Shaquille Vayda to principal, Alex Nguyen and Grace Isford to partner, and Bilal Zuberi , Brandon Reeves , Deena Shakir and Shahin Farshchi to general partner.???
• Palo Alto-based Cowboy Ventures has promoted Jillian Williams to partner.?
• Online wholesale marketplace Faire has hired former WhatsApp exec Ami Vora as chief product officer.
• San Francisco-based business planning platform Anaplan has overhauled its leadership team following its recent acquisition by Thoma Bravo , including Charlie Gottdiener as CEO, Hemant Kapadia as CFO, Carey Pellock as CHRO, Brian Kober as CSO and Gregory Giangiordano as General Counsel.?

This Week in Tech

A weekly advent calendar of tech history from the archives.

It may be the age of electric scooters, but Segway got there first. This week, in 2001, inventor Dean Kamen unveiled the self-balancing, battery-powered vehicle on Good Morning America.?

ICYMI

Here are other top stories of the week from beyond LinkedIn in the broader world of tech.?

• U.S. law enforcement is investigating Elon Musk's Neuralink for potential violations of animal welfare laws amid internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, Reuters reports. The investigation, which is being led by the USDA's inspector general, began following a referral from the U.S. Department of Justice.
• Triller plans to go public in a few weeks, Business Insider reports. The move comes not long after it removed from its video app the song catalogs of major music labels Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group.
• The latest investigation into Sam Bankman-Fried: a broader inquiry into potential market manipulation, The New York Times reports. U.S. federal prosecutors are examining whether he illicitly influenced trading in two cryptocurrencies whose collapse contributed to the demise of FTX.

Thanks for reading. Please share Tech Stack if you like it! And if you have any news tips, find me on InMail.