THE BEST INNOVATIONS OF 2023 PUSHING TECH BOUNDARIES

The desire to improve things is what drives technological innovation. Here are the game-changing innovations unveiled over the last year that caught our attention for taking improvements to a whole new level

...The ultimate e-bike

For anyone who lives in hilly areas, the rise of e-bikes has been welcome. Gone is the embarrassment of puffing up a climb at a snail's pace, while getting overtaken by walkers. A few companies stood out this year, but our favourite is Cowboy, whose Cruiser is as much computer as mode of transport. It has a built-in phone charger, automatic lights and an app to measure your battery life, speed, location and more. Swapping the chain for a belt and hiding the electrical parts inside the frame ensures a sleek, minimalist design and makes it nigh impossible to break. There are no gears - instead, the bike automatically provides enough power for any given situation. It's no surprise, then, that this is not a budget e-bike, but it could be worth the outlay all the same.

Cowboy Cruiser
UK.cowboy.com, From £2,190

...The next-gen AI image generator

ChatGPT was the biggest tech news story of 2023, but its lesser-known sibling, DALL-E, also broke new ground. Launched in early 2021, the original DALL-E was one of the first and most influential artificial intelligence (AI) image generators. With the third iteration unveiled in 2023, OpenAI - the company behind ChatGPT - continued to make the technology more powerful and accurate. For DALL-E 3, detail and understanding of prompts have improved, along with copyright controls (artists can opt out of having their work used for training the AI). Earlier versions were confused by complicated subjects and requests demanding high levels of logic, but DALL'E's 'brain' has also been tweaked to better understand the context of images. We'll be talking about this kind of technology for years to come. Whether that's a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

DALL-E 3 
openai.com, Free