A speedrun through the last six months of emerging tech

It’s been a very long half year. The world of emerging technology entered 2022 flying high on the fumes of 2021, and six months later, a snarl of crises, from war to inflation, makes the prospects for the rest of the year murkier than ever.

Here's our speedrun through the last six months in emerging tech.

January

⚡️Our theme of the month: The year ahead

🚗💨 Headline speedrun:

• A human gets a (gene-edited) pig heart for the first time.
• The James Webb telescope unfurls.
• Bill Gates’s climate group announces a $1.5 billion “catalyst fund.”
• A disease-reversal startup raises $3 billion.

📖 Your favorite story? This list of emerging tech predictions for 2022.

💰VCs invest: $61 billion.

🗣 Quotation of the month: “I think that there is a real genuine, existential risk associated with how that gets done.”—Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, on tech giants creating the metaverse. After 11 years, he’s returned to working on Second Life, a pioneer of digital worlds.

February

⚡️Our theme of the month: Digital health

🚗💨 Headline speedrun:

• Meta breaks out Reality Labs’ financials for the first time (it loses many billions of dollars).
• The IRS says it will use facial recognition, then says it won’t.
• Researchers announce a nuclear-fusion record.
• Russia invades Ukraine, shocking supply chains from semiconductors to EV batteries and prompting an ongoing wave of tech company reactions.

📖 Your favorite story? Our primer on vertical farming, which is growing like a weed.

💰VCs invest: $52 billion

🗣 Quotation of the month: “It’s like being born again”—Jimi Olaghere, one of the first seven patients to receive a Crispr-based gene-editing treatment for sickle cell, as part of a medical trial

March

⚡️Our theme of the month: Smart cities

🚗💨 Headline speedrun:

• Wing makes its 200,000th drone delivery.
• MIT and  Harvard get the Crispr patent.
• London halts trading of nickel, a key EV battery-making material, as the price skyrockets.
• Facebook removes a Zelenskyy deepfake.

📖 Your favorite story? Our reporting on Looker workers unknowingly training their replacements

💰VCs invest: $52 billion, again.

🗣 Quotation of the month: “The most important, and one of the most vulnerable, supply chains the American semiconductor industry is facing today is the supply chain of human talents.”—Mung Chiang, Purdue University’s Dean of the College of Engineering, to Axios

April

⚡️Our theme of the month: Battery tech, for EVs and beyond

🚗💨 Headline speedrun:

• The IPCC declares carbon-removal tech “essential,” and the tech has a banner…fortnight.
• Google releases PaLM, which it says is its most advanced AI…even more than LaMDA. No, it’s not sentient either.
• Project Kuiper secures launch plans.
• Lithium-ion battery prices rise for the first time in a decade, and Rivian founder RJ Scaringe says, “We ain’t seen nothing yet,” basically.

📖 Your favorite story? Now, a Reddit-trained AI can tell you if you…r/…the asshole

💰VCs invest: $47 billion, a 12-month low.

🗣 Quotation of the month: “The cheapest form of carbon removal is mitigation today. It’s always going to be cheaper to cut the tonne of carbon today—that we can—than it will be to suck that carbon out of the atmosphere later in the century.”—Zeke Hausfather, climate lead at Stripe, told us

May

⚡️Our theme of the month: Space tech for humans

🚗💨 Headline speedrun:

• Safety-focused AI startup Anthropic raises half a billion.
• DOE formally announces its $3.5 billion carbon-removal plan.
• Argo.AI tests driverless robotaxis in Austin and Miami.
• Startup claims a $100 human-genome sequence.

📖 Your favorite story? This profile of Jerry Chow, who is building the future of quantum for IBM

💰VCs invest: $39 billion, and sentiment starts to sour.

🗣 Quotation of the month: “The launch industry is at a point where the technology is so mature that it may not be necessary to have the US government invest in it. It may be we’re at a tipping point with this rocket.”—Dan Goldin, a former NASA administrator, to the Wall Street Journal

June

⚡️Our theme of the month: The future of AI safety

🚗💨 Headline speedrun:

• Microsoft ends the sale of some facial-analysis tools, and its CTO tells us AI should be regulated.
• Meta says goodbye to Sheryl Sandberg and reorgs its AI team. Meanwhile, Zuck plays with some VR headsets.
• Google remains mum on responsible AI details. Also: An engineer on the team claims—very controversially—that Google’s LaMDA AI model is sentient.
• Tech layoffs mount.

📖 Your favorite story? A day in the life of a vertical farmer

💰VCs invest: TBD, but probably not good.

🗣 Quotation of the month: “At the end of the day, the market is too big and the opportunity is too great to completely dissipate.”—Paul Mulé, senior vice president of finance at climate software startup Arcadia, to E&E News, re: the climate tech’s prospects in a potential recession