Tech Trends 2023: What's On The Horizon?

[Music] [Music] hello everyone this is Jason bner from triple helix Corporation and welcome back to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joined in studio with uh my senior developer Andy Webster and our other developer Pedro Lopez hello everybody so today we wanted to talk about the new tech trends for 2023 things that we see on the horizon in our world and wanted to share some of our thoughts and observations uh with what we see upcoming in the tech world uh Pedro why don't we start with you what do you see as some of the more emerging trends that we should be all aware of well there's the obvious one which is AI with L the rise of llms and what's an llm a large language model um there's also the uh argumented reality with the Apple vision and um and also virtual reality with the Met metaverse uh you know portrayed outside as you know the meta Quest and all those other uh technologies that um came out in recent years um yeah I mean that's that's the ones that come to mind do you have anything

to add Andy like it's it's cool there's a lot of cool things that you can do with it but like um inherently right now I think it's a little bit in its infant stages and um maybe it should be used for some really simple things but um there's like the way the way that it's being pushed is like oh it's it's going to do all this this stuff which it will eventually someday but right now I think we should stick to the the simple applications of it rather than like immediately putting AR artificial intelligence controlling somebody's somebody's brain for example or something like that like like with neuralink yeah well I mean in a in a more in a more practical term um you know for for what we do um you know there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with llms like reading PDFs like a company can um upload you know PDFs and train on it and then you can for example um as answer questions about like employers uh handbook or um a set of documents about the business or reports annual reports or um

you know Financial reports even um yeah there's a lot of ways that uh we can currently integrate that into the current business world in a way that saves time and and effort uh the biggest caveat that we at triple helix are looking into it internally is um you know a lot of those a lot of the Integrations with this uh Technologies done via sometimes apis and you know there's a dependency on open AI API um and we're not entirely sure how privacy really works with that uh Sim alate the uh founder of open AI came out and said that you know through the API they don't train um you know the the model on the data that you know it's back and forth but um you know I guess the general goal would be to uh provide a way to businesses to have those llms running locally and integrated with their business data in a way that doesn't leave you know the the company and so keeping you know the Privacy not not only the company's clients but also the internal company's data and that's what we're trying to

we're looking currently looking at and uh try to provide that type of solution in the future for our clients right right Andy why don't you talk a little bit about um some of the experience you had with VR and augmented reality some of the trends that you're seeing in those areas um well I mean the first VR I ever tried was the Oculus Rift in beta and like my first my first impression was like whoa this really like this really gets me inside of uh really puts you in another world um which is uh which is really cool and I could see a lot of of cool applications for that like um I mean anything like you could do um virtualization um virtual training would be a great um way to do something like that but um yeah virtual reality training which is you know like for like especially for like I mean the military you think about something like that like that would be a great uh a great application but so what is the difference between virtual reality and what they call an augmented reality which

is what this new I guess um uh Apple Vision system is supposed to do yeah so like augmented reality um I guess if it was a big hit not that long ago but like Pokemon go if anybody ever played that it's like where augmented reality would put it would put um like a display in front of you but you can also see what's going on around you which um I can attest um through some injuries that with a full VR headset you do not know what's going on around you it's very easy to get completely lost trip over things and yeah I should have suffered from [Laughter] that I had to se I had to sell my meta Quest because I was playing a uh firsters shooter and this guy came came up to me shooting and I tried to duck but I thought there was a wall where there wasn't and that was that could have been a bad djery so I was like I better you know put this thing away before I get really hurt oh man this reminds me of a dream where I I rolled over in my dream and instead of instead of rolling into a solid surface

I rolled off the bed but um yeah like apple vision's idea is like more of an augmented reality so that you can kind of have um a combination of virtual world and real world I I want to throw an example from my own history I actually did uh graduate research and flight simulation and one of the things that I came to the conclusion was is that uh certain types of Graphics um enhanced the ability for a pilot we were doing helicopter flight simulation to uh detect where the ground plane was and navigate particularly if it was like low weather conditions and one of the conclusions of the study I ran was that if you ran uh basically a Terrain grid on top of the terrain with like an augmented reality um headset you can improve improve the Fidelity of the Pilot's flight performance in maintaining a specific altitude and so I purported that you know if we wanted to allow like military or even commercial Aviation helicopters to improve their performance and just in safety and overall just simply

a Terrain grid over ground plane where the the vision in certainly weather conditions weren't the greatest would be that vastly improving their performance uh and the study the study proved that in fact so much so that you could actually allow somebody to fly nighttime bad weather as if they were in daytime conditions because it improved their ability to to navigate so well so that was something that I I remembered augmented reality I mean when you think about it it makes a lot of sense like um why is it why is it easier to do things in a video game than it is in real life it's because you have all this like information that you wouldn't have in real life but with augmented reality it's almost like you have a heads up display that you could be just parsing data around you um as you go well but the the the main thing is that um you know the main difference I think with virtual reality and argumented reality is with argumented reality you're uh essentially in using the power of the internet

and data from the internet to enhance the real world uh you know virtual reality you're doing the opposite like you're the enhancement right so you're bringing whatever uh essentially your mind like your experience or rather you're bringing yourself into the internet and living in this virtual world that you know ever so often is trying to mimic the real world so uh I guess that's the biggest flaw with that is that you know they're trying to recreate the the real world into the virtual world and the real world always is going to beat it right uh but you know there's a real use case for not only businesses for personal lives as well when you bring the virtual world to argument the real world it's like a you know it's almost like a 2X right and so um I think that's why people resonate more with argumented reality as opposed to you know virtual reality or the metaverse the metaverse I think has a a real good application for games where you're trying to escape reality but uh for the real world

especially uh you know for businesses you're really trying to enhance processes and you know the way things work and that can be really useful in a scenario like that all right I want to take us on a little further step you know I want we deal a lot with um improving processes for businesses and specifically our manufacturing customers and one of the things that we've noted um that's really gaining a lot of traction is the idea of automation process Automation and if you think about it a process automation is simply something you're doing manually right now it could be like taking numbers off a machine maybe a reading a quality uh data but actually writing that data down because ultimately that handwritten data needs to be then transcribed into a system where it can be recorded and saved uh and the idea that you know you make the processes automated so in this example you know the machine data where you're reading numbers onto a piece of paper you would actually have the machine automatically

capture the data and send it somewhere uh and by that means you could actually improve not only the process you know people aren't handwriting it tendency for errors right but also being able to um save all that time and possibly capture a lot more data because if the process is automated you know your machine is doing the work um Andy talk to me and our listeners about what that looks like and and what we do and and and some of the benefits of actually establishing process automation yeah I mean um when you really think about it um you know it goes the old saying knowledge is power and data is knowledge about your manufacturing process so the more data you have on your manufacturing process like for say say if you have like a a big Factory line um and you've got you know sensors at different points during during the line you can really um by capturing uh capturing that data you can then really report some like metrics like um say if you if you're recycling certain contents and you need

to like um report it to you know a government agency or something to get uh some money back um you could really accurately um report your your your um you know recyc content um your recycled uh materials so that you can um you know really uh maximize your benefits of that and then also just um being able to have really accurate and real- time metrics on what's going on in your um in your company just having basically a your finger on the pulse essentially so um in terms of uh reporting later that also just has a great a great benefit in that you don't have to then spend I don't know a month or or whatever during tax season or um you know tax quarterly tax season as a business would um probably do it um reporting all that and save you a lot of work a lot of um manual labor that's both tedious and expensive right right Pedro same same question and thoughts on the process Automation and benefits of I mean there's there's a whole lack of things like Andy mentioned but um you know from a business

standpoint like you know marketing wise you can automate a lot of like the marketing functionalities as well um I guess like from our standpoint um you know for what we do even uh you could Tim make like uh updates to servers you could you know there's a whole a whole lot of things that you can do with that right right so we talked a lot about you know some of these emerging Trends artificial intelligence augmented reality virtual reality and then now just now process automation um but let's talk about some of like the personal and ethical concerns of technology and and how things are evolving particularly with regards to like internet of things and our privacy and security concerns and things that we want to be aware of uh when using and adopting these new technologies uh Andy I'll start with you on that one yeah so um you know it's great it just like with automation it's great to have information about you know your house your appliances things like that like um one thing I think of

immediately that is probably the most accessible is like a a doorbell camera or something like that and um you know based on your level of Need for privacy you know they they're great for security in the sense that um you can see who's at your door you can talk to them um you can if something happens down the street you can report that to the police but also knowing that um if you're concerned about this that the police departments usually do have veto rights to just take that footage um you know if that concerns you then maybe set up something with a more custom setup which requires more work but um and then the other concern is make sure that you get a camera in that case that is um pretty secure and that also you are practicing secure practices and your passwords and things like that because um if anybody gets a hold of your camera and access to it um you know then sometimes a hacker might just sit on it until they really need something or um if you have cameras inside your home just

be cognizant of like like where you put those so that um you know like don't put them in your bedroom for example um or you know private spaces but um and then I'm also just thinking of like um uh thermostats you know things that you wouldn't want somebody else messing with um except for you be uh you know be uh careful I guess be um be diligent and secure with your um your password management and who you give that password to you know like don't give it to like the delivery guy just so they can open your door and drop something inside your house I don't know if I would uh do that things like that well I remember when I was in college and uh the cloud was becoming a thing I remember somebody from HP came uh to give a a talk and they sort of like let out that the cloud was going to be a thing and we're GNA simply be able to upload things to the cloud and um and we didn't quite know what that was or what we're going to be uh giving companies access to because before then the our personal

data used to live on our machines and our hard drives and our pen drives right um but now I think with like all this you know post cloud and now with like the rise of llms and AI uh people are a little bit more conscious about uh data data privacy and all that um and I think that's going to become even more important and prevalent because you know one thing I've noticed with um with the rise of llms and AI is that initially when open AI came out they racked up subscribers really quick and as other companies try to catch up um they you know a lot of the companies kind of Open Source their uh technology their model uh giving you know springing up like hugging face which is like a platform that you can upload models and whatnot but you know after that happened you know the the open source community for that kind of outpaced a bit the uh you know the the Facebooks and Googles of the world yeah and so I think what that indicates is that uh just like with businesses there's going to be a trend

going forward of you know people taking more accountability and concern about their data and trying to be bring bring that inhouse and developing their own Solutions right uh whether through partnership small uh precise Partnerships or whatnot uh and the same thing should happen eventually with in people's personal lives you know people are going to be become more technology Savvy and inclined and be able to you know create their own networks and you know care more for their data right I remember you know when we were growing up that you know we used to Simply buy a CD uh or a game and put it on the machine right and on the console and play but now the other day I was trying to download uh Call of Duty and it took forever I had to delete games and then I don't really own it because it's like inside of the machine the machine breaks Microsoft like deletes my account I don't have it anymore right so it's I think I think solutions that allow you to keep your stuff private and secure your

stuff is are going to be you know uh a trend in the future uh and we're already seeing that in the business world right A lot of people are reluctant with uh just feeding information through open ai's API and they're looking for ways to do that internally so yeah no good point good point and you know I just wanted to add on to that with regards to the AI and all the tools that we're using is that AI is great because it's generated from a large amount of content however that content where that comes from is some times suspect and you know you want to believe that the content it's taking from is actually legitimate authorized content and sometimes that area can be a little bit gray and so you know this stuff gets better and better as more data is fed into it but we also want to be mindful of the privacy and this is very very true of the businesses we're talking to who want to develop their own AI content in that they don't want to take and develop their own AI applications but then share

it with the rest of the world because in some cases it's proprietary particularly what we have our military customers who deal with you know military parts and whatnot so anything that they're using to improve their their business with that they can't let that information like get out you right so being able to secure that and then just a comment on the more of the privacy and the personal side and you know all these great Technologies like being able to answer the door or let somebody into your house to drop off a package obviously they have concerns of of privacy and security and you know you touched on this briefly Andy with regards to the the thermostat I've I've heard of some horror stories where um thermostat got hacked in somebody's house the the person raised the temperature of the furnace to like 110 degrees and almost burn down the house and you know in that case that's just being uh nefarious and whatnot but I mean having proper Security on all the devices and the things that

you buy is very very important so you know being mindful of the technologies that you're absorbing but really mindful of like what kind of position it puts you and I think is very important so um I think that's all our time for today so I just want want to thank uh my two special guests in studio Andy Webster my senior developer and Lopez uh my other developer and um till next time thanks everybody byebye