You might say 2023 was an eventful year for data scientists and ML professionals, but that wouldn’t quite capture the amount of hectic activity we’ve seen in the field in the past 12 months.
As much as we always aim to resist hype and hyperbole, we have to concede that yes, we’ve seen some dramatic changes in the way both practitioners and society at large view AI and its effects on our daily lives. The launch of ChatGPT in the final weeks of 2022 was far from the only factor in this transition, but it’s difficult to deny its role as both catalyst and symbolic focal point.
When we considered how we can take stock of our authors’ best and most popular work in 2023, then, turning to articles on LLMs in general—and on that one ubiquitous chatbot in particular—became a very natural choice. The selection of articles we present here is by now means exhaustive, but it does offer a representative sample of the articles that you, our readers, responded to the most—whether it’s the ones you couldn’t stop reading and sharing, or those that generated the most thoughtful conversations on TDS and beyond.
Before we dive into the articles that made the biggest splash in the past year, we’d like to take a moment to thank our entire community for your support. We owe a special debt of gratitude to our incredible authors, to our partners at Medium, to a dedicated group of volunteer Editorial Associates who generously offer us their expertise, and to our two former colleagues and extraordinary editors, Caitlin Kindig and Katherine Prairie.
