Four Technology Trends to Watch in 2021
In 2020, although the COVID-19 pandemic has restricted people’s activities and hinders our development, in technology, people continue to move forward with difficulty and even achieve many amazing results.
As of 2021, with economic recovery and widely vaccinated, we still have to look forward to human science and technology. These four technology trends deserve our attention.
1. GPT-n & Alpha-X
On June 11, 2020, OpenAI released an autoregressive language model -Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3(GPT-3). Even though this API is still a beta, there are lots of amazing applications using GPT-3.
You can click the link above to review these applications with GPT-3. We believe there will be more applications and maturity products using GPT-3 and later GPT-n in 2021. These APIs with magic will surely inspire us more. Especially in real-time translation, automatic code completion, program generation, and text generation.
Just into 2021, OpenAI has brought us DALL·E that creates images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.
On another company, Deep Mind continues to bring us surprising products one after another: AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaStar, and the latest AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology.
We can say that AlphaFold has made breakthrough progress. Using this tool can greatly reduce the time for biological research and drug discovery, especially under the current global pandemic, which has far-reaching significance.
2. EV era
In 2020, Tesla has successfully reached its 500,000 productions and delivery goal, which is set at the beginning of 2020.
The Electric vehicles era is coming!
In 1908, Ford introduced the mass-produced Model T, which totaled millions sold over nearly 20 years. Ford opened the era of the gasoline car. Today, What Tesla is trying to do is to replace fossil fuels-powered cars and start the age of electric vehicles (EVs).
In 2021, we’ll see more electric vehicles on the road, not only electric cars but also electric trucks, electric supercars, etc. Besides electricity as the driving power, EVs will also apply 5G networks and AI.
3. T-800 Back
On Dec 30, 2020, Boston Dynamics’ entire lineup of robots — the humanoid Atlas, the SPOT, and the Handle — give us a dance “Do You Love Me?” to welcome the New Year. The Atlas robot is the star of this show: smoothly running, jumping, shuffling, and twirling through a different coordinated dance routine.
The Atlas reminds me of the famous robot — T800, the humanoid robot in the movie The Terminator.
The SPOT robots are already on sale, and in 2021, we expect more advanced robots combining machine learning technology to enter our daily lives.
4. Spacex Starship
On Wednesday, December 9, Starship serial Number 8 (SN8) prototype soars on epic test launch, with an explosive landing. Starship is the most important part of SpaceX Mission: Mars.
SpaceX Mars program is a development program initiated by Elon Musk and SpaceX in order to facilitate the eventual colonization of Mars.
Although this test exploded on landing, we still expect SN-n series to be successful in a series of tests in 2021.
From 2021, people will open a new era of human interstellar exploration.
Some say as if human technological development has stagnated since the millennium, people immerse in pleasure and lost their spirit of discovery. The outbreak of the pandemic has made us humans take a better look at our own development. As the good news of vaccines continues to come, we also believe that mankind will eventually overcome this plague and begin the second Renaissance in human history.
“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it” — Movie: Tennet (2020)
