Nvidia, Artificial Intelligence, & Bitcoin Dominate Headlines in 2024

This is the second-last edition of this year's "Tech, What the Heck!?" newsletter. To commemorate yet another year of writing this once-weekly newsletter, I'm going to recap some of the major events that I covered this year and some of my favorite editions of "Tech, What the Heck." ;-)

During 2024, I personally wrote over 30 newsletters while taking help from my colleagues for a few editions during the times I was away.

In my very first newsletter of the year, I predicted that 2024 was going to be the year of the crypto. I have made no secret of my very strong misgivings about cryptocurrencies, so my forecast in January may have come as a surprise to some readers.

However, my reporting had more to do with the very-first approval of a spot bitcoin exchange- traded-fund, or ETF, in the US following a long and arduous process. I never expected bitcoin to surpass the $100k barrier and I still think cryptocurrencies make a poor case as both a store of value and a medium of exchange ;-)

February was a bit mild in comparison. I reported on the tug of war between Microsoft and Apple to remain the most valuable company in the world, as well as on continuing job cuts in big tech.

By March though, something really special started to happen. Nvidia, the arms dealer of generative AI, hit $2 trillion in market cap. This was a special feat, given that it hadn't even been a year since Nvidia hit the $1 trillion market cap for the first time.

Naturally, I began to follow Nvidia a bit more closely, and in the same month, I wrote one of my favorite "Tech, What the Heck" editions of the year: Nvidia Throws Gamers Under the Bus. Looking back, this specific edition really helped me contextualize everything Nvidia did for the remainder of 2024.

In the story, I interpolated that Nvidia was no longer the brand everyone had come to know and love. It had transformed into a company obsessed with pumping out as many graphic cards as it could to meet the blooming demand for artificial intelligence workload, much to the chagrin of retail customers who relied on Nvidia graphic cards to play or do creative work.

In April, I touched on Sam Bankman-Fried's sentencing and Elon Musk's annoyance with mainstream media, while May started with my piece on Sony's discriminatory rules when porting games to PCs. However, the same month, it became very clear to me that Nvidia was on its way to become the most valuable company in the world, and only a few weeks later, in June, Nvidia finally hit $3 trillion in market cap.

July started with reporting on the mounting legal challenges OpenAI was facing for copyright infringement, with some additional reporting on what the company's next AI model could be. Though the big event that month was, of course, the Crowdstrike outage and the ensuing chaos in the weeks after. Parallel to that, I did some reporting on the growing agitation on Wall Street on artificial intelligence investment(s).

August was another bad month for employees as Intel announced massive layoffs, though the same couldn't be said about big tech, given they had a good quarter. The same month, I reported on Google's attempts to catch up to Microsoft in generative artificial intelligence.

And then, in September, I wrote my magnum opus of the year. A hands-on review of Perplexity, where I put to test the AI search engine's claims and made some predictions on where the company could fit in the overall search engine market. The same month, I also took a look into whether the new iPhone and Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro would be dead on arrival.

October began with reporting on the US government's recommendation that Google be broken up, followed by a story on the deteriorating relations between Microsoft and OpenAI.

In November, I recapped big tech's Q3 and reported on the winners of Trump's reelection to the White House. Then, to cap the year off, I reported on the troubles caused by Intel's now former chief executive Pat Gelsinger and Nvidia's bumpy results and implicit confirmation of delays with the Blackwell chips.

As you can tell, most of my reporting had to do with either cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, or Nvidia.

In terms of views, the top 5 most read "Tech, What the Hecks" this year were:

• Nvidia Throws Gamers Under the Bus
• Job Cuts in Big Tech Continue Unabated
• I Tried Perplexity For a Week, And I Don't Think AI Search Engines Can Replace Google.. Yet
• Is OpenAI Stealing Your Content?
• Nvidia Just Became a Whole Lot More Valuable

But what about my favorites? :-)

Well, I obviously enjoyed writing my hands-on review of Perplexity, but the two stories I'm most proud of this year are my deep-dive in the change of direction at Nvidia and Intel's woes. In both those cases, I was able to correctly predict which way the wind was blowing (no easy feat in tech), and the scenarios I had described (Nvidia's change in strategy, and the possibility of Intel firing its CEO) ultimately ended up coming true.

Next week, my colleagues and I will recap what we thought were the biggest stories of 2024. So stay tuned for that!

In Other News.. 📰

• Bitcoin Mining Economics Continued to Improve in December, JPMorgan Says — via CoinDesk
• Google DeepMind unveils a new video model to rival Sora — via TechCrunch
• Why the COO of one of the world's foremost AI companies spent 50 hours interviewing for her job — via CNN
• Bitcoin rallies past $107,000, hopes grow for strategic reserve — via Reuters
• Bitcoin rallies past $107,000, hopes grow for strategic reserve — via Axios
• MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor says bitcoin is ‘cyber Manhattan’ — a ‘good investment’ even at the top — via CNBC

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends! See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon

*All rankings are current as of Monday. To see how the rankings have changed, please visit HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.

Tech, What the Heck!? is a once-weekly newsletter written by HackerNoon editors that combine HackerNoon's proprietary data with news-worthy tech stories from around the internet. Humorous and insightful, the newsletter recaps trending events that are shaping the world of tech. Subscribe here.