‘It got pretty weird’: The 5 most bizarre moments in tech in 2023

It was a long year for Silicon Valley, but it may have felt even longer to outsiders who watched it essentially implode and regroup over the course of 2023.

It was a long year for Silicon Valley, but it may have felt even longer to outsiders, who watched the tech world essentially implode and regroup over the course of 2023 in ways both typical (layoffs, restructurings) and deeply unhinged (everything below). From the failure of its biggest bank to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s bizarre Vogue spread, regular people this year seemed to get a glimpse into the tech elite that was weirder and more personal than ever. One note: There’s no Elon Musk on our list, as the tech billionaire’s 2023 antics went far beyond weird and into areas including antisemitism, giving a platform to Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and doing little to address virulently racist, sexist and harassing content on X. That’s not just according to us (and people with eyes). That’s according to multiple media watchdogs — which Musk has, in turn, sued. Here, in no particular order, are the CNN tech team’s five favorites. The rise of the artificial intelligence chatbot grabbed headlines in 2023, but one of the most visible moments was a highly read and very weird conversation between New York Times reporter Kevin Roose and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot in February. What was supposed to be a primer on how the tool worked devolved rapidly into a fever dream of robotic hallucinations and an increasingly creepy conversation that culminated in the chatbot, which called itself Sydney, asking Roose to leave his wife.