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It's been a long year in Silicon Valley, but to an outsider watching the tech world, it may have seemed even longer. in 2023 will essentially fall apart and regroup in the usual ways (layoffs, reorganizations) and in completely incompatible ways (all below).

From the biggest bank failure For the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos' weird Vogue has gone viralOrdinary people seemed to get a glimpse of the tech elite this year that was weirder and more personal than ever.

One note: there is none Elon Musk is on our list because in 2023 the tech billionaire's antics have included much more than the odd, including anti-Semitism, giving a platform to Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and making little effort to combat X's blatantly racist, sexist and harassing content. It's not just according to us (and people with eyes). This is what several media watchdogs say – which Musk in turn sued.

Here, in no particular order, are CNN's tech teams five favorites

in 2023 the emergence of an artificial intelligence chatbot grabbed the headlines, but one of the most visible moments was widely read and very strange conversation February. between New York Times reporter Kevin Roose and Microsoft's chatbot Bing.

What was supposed to be a tutorial on how the tool works quickly turned into a fever dream of robotic hallucinations and more and more terrible conversation which ended up being a chatbot, who called herself Sydney, begging Roose to leave his wife.

Conversation was the first time many readers really started to wonder if AI is really a good idea for humanity?

The lack of women in Silicon Valley has been well-documented for decades, but nowhere is it more evident than in the list of speakers at the DevTernity tech conference, which seems to had only one (real) speaker.

However, things got very strange when conference organizer Eduard Sizov stated in a post X that at least one woman profile was “auto-generated, with a random name, a random Twitter handle, a random photo,” the Associated Press reported, when creating fake speaker profile for a woman, it's a change was quickly spotted and eventually the entire event was stopped.

Kristine Howard, head of Amazon Web Services, wrote in a LinkedIn post that the revelation and apparently fake speaker profiles led to her decision to drop out, saying, “I found out I was the only woman on the agenda and few others. advertised may be fake'.

Sizov told CNN in a statement that he believed the conference was deliberately targeted by opponents who wanted to shut it down after it successfully started in 2015.

“But success can be uncomfortable for some,” he said. “Therefore, if the test speaker's placeholder hadn't mistakenly appeared on the production site, those trying to ditch the conference would have found another way to reach their end goal.”

The housing shortage in the Bay Area is a constant headline, but last spring it hit the left when news broke that a group of tech billionaires including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman and Laurene Powell Jobs. quietly bought up 55,000 acres on the edge of the Bay Area to build a utopian city to house their workers and reinvent urban design.

It came as a surprise to farmers who have farmed the area for generations and wondered why all their neighbors were selling out, prompting an ongoing investigation by the federal government, concerned about its proximity to Travis Air Force Base.

The trial of former cryptocurrency kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried some interesting revelations were expected given the scale of the multi-billion dollar company he created.

But no one could have expected such forehead beaters:

Bankman-Fried was eventually convicted on seven counts after hours of jury deliberations and now faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison. You can see CNN's most terrifying moments in our analysis here.

Maybe The freshest weird tech moment in our collective minds is the tornado chase and recovery Founder and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman in a the five day saga in November.

From the late-night firing on Friday to two quickly appointed and then ousted interim CEOs to a letter signed by most of the company demanding that Altman return and Microsoft offer to hire both Altman and all the disgruntled employees, the minute-by-minute changes in the situation provided plenty of drama and whiplash for viewers.

The sheer intensity and whirlwind of coverage created a week of OpenAI headlines and news waves – only for Altman to go back to where he started.

Failure left people are interested in how the company could handle any scandal so badly, and whether the company should be entrusted with developing some of the world's most consequential future technologies.