The dominant enterprise technology story for 2023 can be summed up in two letters: AI. Companies were either adopting generative artificial intelligence, thinking about adoption or offering technology that enabled it.

There were other topics making news in 2023. Many interviews on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio, and SiliconANGLE’s ongoing new coverage of major tech events provided a wealth of commentary. Here are a few of the more memorable quotes from one reporter’s notebook in 2023:

“As a company we’ve been preparing for this moment for some time. AI will be one of the most profound shifts we will see in our lifetime.” – Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google LLC and its parent Alphabet Inc., during his keynote address at Google Cloud Next in August.

“It’s not even a wave; it’s a tidal wave or maybe even the tide itself. AI and machine learning are not something you add to your products; it’s very much a new paradigm to do all technology.” – Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face Inc., during an interview on theCUBE in March.

“You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world as people try to figure out how to do this.” – Mat Honan, editor in chief at MIT Technology Review, commenting on the AI wave during the Future Compute conference in May.

“AI washing is at an all-time high, and Eric Schmidt talked about that today, about how we’re really good at hype. The companies that are talking about AIOps the most have the least AI. You have to break down and be clear about who you are selling to and how you bring AI to that party.” – Rob Strechay, industry analyst for SiliconANGLE, during a discussion on theCUBE at the Databricks Data + AI Summit in June.

“The day that ChatGPT was really released was the same way that you had Nokia and Motorola when Apple dropped the iPhone. There was definitely a moment where everyone said, ‘Oh, this is different.’ Generative AI is something approachable and usable immediately by the majority of the population.” – Ryan Kovar, distinguished security strategist and leader of SURGe at Splunk Inc., in a July interview at theCUBE’s Supercloud 3 event.

“What I do on Zoom they can now use to train their system. I’m not cool with that, but there’s no button I can push that says, ‘Don’t train me, bro.’ This is going to be the next battle on the internet.” – Jeff Moss, president of DEF CON Communications Inc. and founder of Black Hat, during his keynote remarks at Black Hat USA in August.

“Netflix brought shows in ‘as is,’ and they gave them the Netflix value. I want to bring the best AI software and hardware to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and do a fulfillment by Oracle on that. We are looking to become the Netflix of AI.” – Elad Ziklik, vice president of AI and data science services at Oracle Corp., during an interview with theCUBE in February.

“AI has a dirty secret: It’s dirty. Generative AI is amazingly intensive. It’s booming, but so is its carbon footprint. Data centers are being built everywhere. This is a problem that’s not going to go away.” – Leslie Miley, technical adviser to the CTO at Microsoft Corp., delivering keynote remarks during the London QCon Conference in April.

“The equation has now changed: Microsoft basically cut the line with the OpenAI deal. The hyperscalers have all dominated the AI conversation, and they’ve put a lot of investment in there. There are really interesting changing dynamics on the chessboard.” – Dave Vellante, industry analyst with SiliconANGLE, commenting on Microsoft’ Corp.’s $10 billion investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI, during theCUBE’s Supercloud 3 event in July.

“There is not going to be one model to rule them all. You need to be trying out different models, you need a real choice of model providers. I think events of the last 10 days have made that very clear.” – Adam Selipsky, CEO of Amazon Web Services Inc., in his keynote remarks at AWS re:invent following days of boardroom turmoil at OpenAI in November.

“We can all hear the roar of the ocean. Without good AI, bad AI will take us for a ride.” – Rohit Ghai, CEO of RSA Security LLC, during his keynote address at the RSA Conference in April.

“Generative AI is going to cause a massive amount of attacks. Just like generative AI can help you scale your business from a security standpoint, to be able to put tools in place and actually monitor what’s going on and have all of that be automated… so can the threat actors. The threat actors can now scale.” – Steve Kenniston, senior cybersecurity consultant at Dell Technologies Inc., during an interview on theCUBE in October.

“There is new AI and old-fashioned AI. You should keep in mind that not everything needs to be done with these large language models. AI makes predictions, professionals decide.” – Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer of Amazon.com Inc., on the keynote stage at AWS re:Invent in November.

“Some say follow the money; I say follow developers. The developers have gone multicloud.” – Vittorio Viarengo, vice president of Cross-Cloud services at VMware Inc., during an interview on theCUBE’s Supercloud 2 broadcast event in January.

“I see legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. Where we’re moving is trying to define the specific attributes and frameworks of that, to make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. Maybe that’s what the supercloud is.” – Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, in an interview during theCUBE’s Supercloud 2 event in January.

“We’ve massively lowered what it takes to start a software business. We created a full stack, where not only can I build it, not only can I sell it to the enterprise because it’s on the Snowflake platform, but now I can market it through our marketplace.” – Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Inc., during an interview with theCUBE at the Snowflake Summit in July.

“You are starting to see the builders, global enterprises are adopting this building mentality with cloud native. The builders’ movement is going to be big to watch. What gets built on top of the cloud will have significant market value.” – John Furrier, industry analyst for SiliconANGLE, during Supercloud 2 in January.

“A developer goes on stage and says, ‘Hey, we all have this problem. Here’s how I solved it.’ It’s available on GitHub three months later, and they’re getting their ‘A’ round and they have a booth at KubeCon. That is now the pace of the way this works.” – Kelsey Hightower, software engineer and developer advocate, in conversation with theCUBE during KubeCon+CloudNative CON in November.

“I hope for accountability. Raising venture capital is a responsibility, not merely an accomplishment, and breaching this trust should incur significant consequences. You cannot achieve a genuine product-market fit when a significant portion of the ‘revenue’ is fabricated.” – Subbu Ponnuswamy, co-founder and former CTO of Cloudbrink Inc., in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE. In December, Ponnuswamy filed a lawsuit against the company he founded, alleging financial fraud.

“If you actually watch a broadcast, you may see a player take off his hat, check the inside of his hat, or the catcher trying to check his wrists or armbands. Those are preloaded with reports that we’ve generated using our data and visualizations. Everything is data-driven now, and baseball is no exception.” – Alexander Booth, assistant director of R&D at Texas Rangers Baseball Club, during an interview with theCUBE at the Databricks Data + AI Summit in June.

“We have the equivalent of several lifetimes of human driving data. Our purpose is to get driverless transportation out there because it’s safer. Betting against autonomous vehicles right now is like saying Facebook is never going to make it because it’s only on college campuses.” – Kyle Vogt, co-founder and former CEO of Cruise Inc., speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. Cruise suspended all U.S operations in October following concerns expressed by regulators over passenger and pedestrian safety and Vogt resigned from the company.

“We make our devices so complicated to use, it’s miserable to be on the computer. That’s because we are trying to fill in every control possible in every scenario possible of how a threat actor can get in. I’m on this screen all the time trying to pick out the bicycle. What square is the bicycle in? Here I am having done this for 30 years and find it complicated with the most basic things.” – Mignona Coté, NetApp Inc.’s chief security officer, in an interview during theCUBE’s Supercloud 3 event in July.

“If there is anything we’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that you can plan for today and you can even plan for tomorrow, but your tomorrow is going to look a lot different than what you thought.” – Lisa Spelman, corporate vice president and general manager of Xeon products at Intel Corp., during an interview on theCUBE in January.

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