What are AI companies aiming for?

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI plan to spend at least $325 billion by the end of the year in pursuit of Al. Cade Metz in San Francisco and Karen Weise in Seattle explain why they’re doing it.

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Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAl, isn’t shy about how much his company plans to spend on its quest to build artificial intelligence.

“You should expect OpenAl to spend trillions of dollars on things like data-centre construction in the not-too-distant future,” Mr Altman recently said, referring to the massive computing facilities that power the company’s Al technologies.

“You should expect a bunch of economists to wring their hands and say ‘This is so crazy. It's so reckless’ or whatever. And we'll just be like: “You know what? Let us do our thing”

So, what exactly is that thing? As the tech industry spends and spends, turning farmland into data centres and AI researchers into some of the most highly paid workers in the country, ithas struggled to explain what it is building and why it is spending so much money.

Are they building an AI system as smart as humans? A godlike machine that will change the world if it doesn’t destroy humanity first? Are they working on fancier versions of software they have been selling for decades? Is all this money going into a bold plan to create fake online friends and more effective ads? Or are they just afraid of missing out on what everyone else is doing?

Here is a rundown of the visions, from the very plausible to the fantastical and why they're pursuing those ideas:

A BETTER SEARCH ENGINE

Chatbots work a lot like a search engine, except they generate plain English answers rather than a list of blue links. This can be a quicker, easier and more intuitive way of answering questions, though chatbots often get things wrong and even make stuff up.

Google's search engine is the tech industry's most profitable business. If companies could provide a better way of searching for information, they could capture a market of billions of people.