THE AI ARMS RACE IS CHANGING EVERYTHING

Tech companies are betting big on AI. Are they making the same old mistakes?

- ANDREW R. CHOW AND BILLY PERRIGO

TO CREATE IS HUMAN. FOR THE PAST 300,000 YEARS we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before.

Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice.

Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer.

This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since social media. Generative AI tools have been adopted ravenously in recent months by a curious, astounded public, thanks to programs like ChatGPT, which responds coherently (but not always accurately) to virtually any query, and Dall-E, which allows you to conjure any image you dream up. In January, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users, a faster rate of adoption than Instagram or TikTok. Hundreds of similarly astonishing generative AIs are clamoring for adoption, from Midjourney to Stable Diffusion to GitHub’s Copilot, which allows you to turn simple instructions into computer code.