The (half) year in review

A lot has changed in just six months. Here are a few larger trends I've seen emerging as we hit the mid-year mark.

Author’s note: In observance with the holiday next week, Tuesday’s issue on July 4 will be moved to Thursday. There will also be no issue coming out on Wednesday.

We’ve officially hit the six-month mark of 2023, a time period that already feels like a decade. It also neatly coincided with the end of the Databricks Data + AI Summit in San Francisco, which included one of the largest AI announcements of the year.

This month (June 12, to be exact) also coincides with the six-year anniversary of Google’s seminal paper, “Attention is all you need.” That one at this point needs zero introduction other than that the authors, and many other Googlers, have gone on to build some of the bigger emerging AI companies.

I thought now was as good a time as any to revisit some of the developments in the past six months—not through the lens of the absurd pace of technological development, but through some of the broader industry milestones that have been on the minds of professionals and investors throughout the year.