But what really blows my noodle is how rare AI skepticism still is in the media. One year ago, ChatGPT was opened to the public. The onslaught of overheated and careless rhetoric about our imminent ascent to a new plane of existence (or our imminent extermination) began then and has not slowed since. It’s inherent to the financial interests of journalism for professional media to sensationalize, after all. (This is a complaint that’s old enough that it was made by Charles Dickens, among many other journalists.) And so I’m not at all surprised that there’s been so many stories about how nothing will ever be the same, even as we’re all still just living busy little ordinary lives like we always have.

I’m optimistic because it felt like AI was going to do nothing but be the Consumer Internet, it was just going to serve you stuff. This idea where actually normal people with normal jobs in their normal life can be more productive and can do more things and they’re not gated by “Will OpenAI give you permission to do it?”. No. Literally, anyone can

What ChatGPT can do is a marvel. We are at the dawn of a new technological era. But it is easy to see how it could turn dark — and quickly. A.I. systems like this make the production and manipulation of text (and code and images and eventually audio and video) functionally costless. They will be deployed to produce whatever makes us most

I’m not scared of AI or hopeful. I don’t think those words really matter: it’s like asking whether it made sense to be scared or hopeful about the printing press, or the first written alphabet. Humans continually invent things that are immediately beyond their control, and we are doing so again. The world those inventions bring about is something

In the course of a year, the tech industry’s dreary post-social, post-crypto interregnum was rapidly supplanted — largely as the result of public-facing efforts by OpenAI, which is reportedly in talks with Microsoft about a potential $10 billion investment — by a story about inevitable technologies that are  so  transformat

Imagine being able to have a language conversation about anything with a computer. This is now possible and available to many people for the first time with ChatGPT. In this episode we take a look at the consequences and some interesting insights from Open AI’s CEO Sam Altman.