That was quick: Artificial intelligence has gone from science fiction to novelty to Thing We Are Sure Is the Future. One easy way to measure the change is via headlines -- like the ones announcing Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company behind the dazzling ChatGPT text generator, followed by other AI startups looking for big money. Or the ones about school districts frantically trying to cope with students using ChatGPT to write their term papers. Or the ones about digital publishers like CNET and BuzzFeed admitting or bragging that they're using AI to make some of their content -- and investors rewarding them for it. "Up until very recently, these were science experiments nobody cared about," says Mathew Dryhurst, co-founder of the AI startup Spawning.ai.

The team behind the viral artificial intelligence ChatGPT has created a tool that checks if text was written by a human or an AI. It was only recently that OpenAI, the creators behind ChatGPT, talked about how popular their artificial intelligence has gotten since its release. Officials at the company explained that they had no idea that ChatGPT was going to be so popular and that the response they saw from the internet was "definitely surprising". Through ChatGPT's massive popularity, some problems have occurred, such as students using the AI to generate essays and other written work. Since ChatGPT can produce text responses at a very impressive level, educators are having trouble determining if the students' work was written by them or an AI.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced on Wednesday it is piloting a $20 monthly subscription plan that offers users priority access to the AI chatbot even during peak times. The paid plan, called ChatGPT Plus, comes two months after the tool was released publicly and quickly went viral, thanks to its ability to generate shockingly convincing essays in response to user prompts. Many people who wanted to test the tool have been locked out or joined the waitlist. Now, anyone who signs up for a subscription will benefit from faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements. The tool will remain free for the general public, however.

INan unremarkable conference room inside OpenAI's office, insulated from the mid-January rain pelting San Francisco, company president Greg Brockman surveys the "energy levels" of the team overseeing the company's new artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT. "How are we doing between'everything's on fire and everyone's burned out' to'everyone's just back from the holidays and everything's good'? What's the spectrum?" he asks. "I would say the holidays came at just the right time," replies one lieutenant. Within five days of ChatGPT's November launch, 1 million users overloaded its servers with trivia questions, poetry prompts and recipe requests. Open-AI quietly routed some of the load to its training supercomputer, thousands of interconnected graphics processing units (GPUs) custom-built with allies Microsoft and Nvidia, while long-term work on its next models, like the highly anticipated GPT-4, took a back seat. As the group huddles, ChatGPT's at-capacity servers still turn away users.

ChatGPT has captured the public imagination in a way the tech world hasn't seen since the debut of the iPhone in 2007. Why it matters: Most of us are only now getting a glimpse of just how smart artificial intelligence has become. What it is: ChatGPT is a free (for now) site that lets users pose questions and give directions to a bot that can answer with conversation, term papers, sonnets, recipes -- almost anything. In almost any style you specify. The big picture: The possibilities for ChatGPT seem endless.

OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence company, has recently announced a new product called "ChatGPT Plus". This new offering aims to revolutionize the way people interact with AI technology by providing a more intuitive and conversational interface. The company has stated that ChatGPT-Plus will be available starting at $20, making it accessible to a wider range of consumers and businesses. ChatGPT-Plus is a cutting-edge language model that has been developed by OpenAI using the latest in deep learning and natural language processing techniques. The model is designed to understand and respond to natural language queries, just like a human would.

After years of research, it appears that artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching a sort of tipping point, capturing the imaginations of everyone from students saving time on their essay writing to leaders at the world's largest tech companies. Excitement is building around the possibilities that AI tools unlock, but what exactly these tools are capable of and how they work is still not widely understood. We could write about this in detail, but given how advanced tools like ChatGPT have become, it only seems right to see what generative AI has to say about itself. Everything in the infographic above – from illustrations and icons to the text descriptions --was created using generative AI tools such as Midjourney. Everything that follows in this article was generated using ChatGPT based on specific prompts.

So, let's see what you can do with it, shall we? Rather than give you a description of our own, we thought, given the nature of this article, to let ChatGPT answer for itself. "I am a language model developed by OpenAI. I was trained on a diverse range of internet text, including websites, books, and more. This allows me to generate human-like text responses to a wide range of questions and prompts," ChatGPT explains. "My training data encompasses a wide range of topics, so I can converse on many subjects, including but not limited to science, history, mathematics, and current events. However, I am still just a machine, and while I can generate responses that are similar to what a human might say, I do not have thoughts, feelings, or consciousness," it adds.

On Thursday, February 2 at 19:30 GMT: Generative AI is the latest wave in artificial intelligence technology that has captured the imagination of citizens, technologists and investors alike. The technology, which can generate new content in response to brief prompts, is being touted for its potential to revolutionise how humans interact with computers. Developed with machine learning, generative AI tools are exposed to large data sets and trained to create novel material based on the information they consume. The applications to daily life range from streamlining the process of coding or developing architectural designs to how we use search engines or even write essays. While some may fear generative AI will replace jobs, others see the technology as a way to relieve some workers of tedious tasks.

Social media company and Snapchat maker Snap has for years defined itself as a "camera company," despite its failures to turn its photo-and-video recording glasses known as Spectacles into a mass-market product and, more recently, its decision to kill off its camera-equipped drone. But that hasn't stopped the company from envisioning a future where AR glasses are a commonly used device, and one, as the company revealed on Tuesday's fourth-quarter earnings call, that will eventually be powered by AI technology. Investors wanted to get a sense of how Snap was thinking about the latest developments in AI -- particularly in buzzy areas like generative AI. which has benefited from advances in algorithms, language models and the increased processing power available to run the necessary calculations. One pointed to the AI image generator Midjourney's bot for Discord as an example of how AI could lead to increased user engagement within an app. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel agreed that, in the near term, there were a lot of opportunities to use generative AI to make Snap's camera more powerful.