Can Microsoft Hold Its Lead?

IT'S HARD TO BELIEVE WE'RE NOT EVEN A YEAR INTO THE AI revolution. Was it only nine months ago that OpenAI released ChatGPT, launching 10,000 gleeful "I Asked ChatGPT to [Blank] and Here's What Happened" articles?

- FERNANDO VOLKEN TOGNI

The vibe shifted when people saw how often the technology "hallucinated" (i.e., got its facts wildly and dangerously wrong) and screeched to a cringey halt when Sydney, the nowretired nickname for Bing's chatbot, told Kevin Roose of The New York Times that it loved him. You could single out many moments as the tipping point of generative AI's innocent "this is so cool!" phase, but I'd nominate that one.

In the months since, there has been hand-wringing about the need for government regulation and enormous anxiety about AI's potential to kill jobs. None of which has slowed the technology's astonishingly rapid integration into the software we use in our daily lives.