Many people are saying that 2020 is a giant, huge, stinking dumpster fire of a year and I honestly can’t really disagree with that on many fronts. Recessions, loss of life, job losses and more is not good.
Today though I want to look to the brighter side of 2020 as there has been a huge amount of good stuff happening even with all the negatives of COVID-19. So let’s dive into the categories and see what’s launched, why it’s amazing and hopefully you too can agree that 2020 hasn’t been all bad.
Due to the huge number of new technologies released and tracked, I’m not going to go into detail on all of them. I’ve also highlighted some of the more major advances in yellow. If you’d like more info please follow the link!
Machine Learning
- LO-Shot Learning Invented (brand new AI training technique to enable current AI levels with only tens or hundreds of training data points not millions)
- AI Beats Human In 57 Atari Games
- GPT-3 Launches, Shows First Signs Of AGI (capable of fooling humans on Reddit, getting its articles into the top posts category, writing poetry, fan fiction novels and even coding)
Compute
- AMD Unleashes Zen 3 CPU’s, Beating Intel At Gaming
- Nvidia RTX 3000 Series GPU’s Crush It (doubles number of transistors, almost triples number of CUDA cores, 8K 60fps gaming and adds 25% more VRAM that’s 50% faster)
- SK Hynix Launches Industry First DDR5 Module (20% lower power, double the RAM size per module, double the transfer speed and includes EEC built in)
- Seagate Launches 20 TB HDD
- Sabrent Launches 2TB, 7GB/s M.2 Rocket 4 Plus (essentially maxes out the brand new PCIe Gen 4 standard already but don’t worry, PCIe Gen 5 is coming in 2022)
- Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G Launches (adds 5G at 5Gbps, 120Hz screen, 50% more RAM, 10% bigger battery and 8K video recording)
- Oculus Launches Quest 2 (almost doubles the resolution, increases refresh rate, is lighter and costs 25% less)
- Fugaku Supercomputer Completed Running At 415 PFLOPS (280% faster than the previous worlds fastest)
Cryptocurrencies
- Ethereum 2.0 Launches
- DeFi v1.0 Movement Booms
- PayPal Supports Crypto (Buy, sell and use BTC/LTC/ETH for everyday transactions)
- Facebook Libra Dies
- Multibillion Dollar Companies Move To BTC (multiple companies begin to treat BTC as a reserve currency)
Energy
- Solar Hits 1.35 c/kWh USD in Dubai
- Wind And Solar At 10% World Wide Energy
- Solar Officially Cheapest Energy Source In History
Medicine / Health / Bio
- Gene Editing Cures Muscular Dystrophy
- OECD36 Life Expectancy Over 80 Years
- Nuralink Announces The Link, 1,024 Channels, 23x8mm Brain Implant
- Gene Edited Mosquitoes Approved
Nanotechnology
- OWIC Launched (100,000 x 150,000 nm in size, costs < $0.01 each, can be mass produced in the hundreds of thousands and has over 1,000 transistors in each of them)
- Contact Lens With 70,000 Pixel Screen (also includes a battery and accompanying electronics all on a contact lense)
Robotics
- Mavic Air 2 (4K at 60FPS, 10% longer flight time and half the price)
- Spot Robot Launched For $75K (can effortlessly climb up stairs, navigate around construction sites and basically go anywhere with a range of sensors on its back)
- Samsung Shows Off Robot Kitchen (fully cuts up, prepares, cooks meals and then cleans up after)
Space
- SpaceX Launches 12 x 60 Satellite Starlink (with 3 more launches remaining this year, there should be around 1,000 Starlink satellites in orbit allowing Starlink to begin service in USA/Canada)
- SpaceX Starship 150m Flight Test
- SpaceX Starship SN5 150m Flight Test
- SpaceX Starship SN6 150m Flight Test (SpaceX making the world changing look ridiculously easy as per normal)
Transport
- Tesla Launches 4680 Battery Cell (16% more range, 14% cost reduction, tabless cell design as well as multiple other new improvements and a new structural battery module design)
- Tesla Launches Model S Plaid (<2s 0-60mph, 320 km/h top speed and an 830 km EPA range)
- Tesla Model 3 Increases Range, Drops Price, Adds Features
- Tesla FSD Beta Launched (said to enable completely intervention free drives and rolling out to everyone by the end of 2020)
Still More To Come!
That’s a lot of tech and a lot of serious advancements, especially in a year that’s been so disruptive in general too. Add onto this that we’re still not even done! AMD is scheduled to drop their heavily anticipated Radeon 6000 GPU’s on October 28th, Clean Meat costs are still plummeting and are now around $155/kg (down 97% in just 3 years) plus SpaceX Starship SN8 is due to take a 15km Flight Test any day now which will be utterly incredible to say the least (read here as to why).
2020 has and will continue to be, amazing across a wide range of technologies. Even with extensive reading it’s impossible to keep up with everything and we have to leave some things out like the civilisation saving announcement by China to go carbon neutral by 2060.
So what amazing, huge advances have you seen or read about that we haven’t covered here? Do you think 2021 will be even better? Let us know below in the comments!
The benefits include: 1) How to get those silky smooth videos that everyone loves to watch, even if you're new 2) How to fly your drone, from taking off to the most advanced flight modes 3) Clear outlines of how to fly with step-by-step instructional demonstrations and more 4) Why flying indoors often results in new pilots crashing their drone 5) What other great 3rd party apps are out there to get the most out of your drone 6) A huge mistake many pilots make when storing their drone in the car and how to avoid it 7) How to do all of these things whilst flying safely and within your countries laws.
