This is a weekly newsletter exploring the collision of technology and humanity. What's exciting about AI right now is that the platform layer is solidifying, meaning that it's time for the application layer to emerge. Over the past few months, I've written several Digital Native pieces about what's happening in AI. Given that this is the topic in tech as we head into 2023, I wanted to combine those pieces into one cohesive deep-dive on AI, and then expand upon them. The result is that this is a longer piece than usual, but my hope is that it offers a "state of the union" snapshot for where we are and a hint at where we might be going. When I think about what's happening in artificial intelligence, I tend to think of two movies. One came out 33 years ago, and one came out 10 months ago. Hyperland is a mostly-forgotten 1990 film written by Douglas Adams, an author best known for writing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The premise of Hyperland (which you can watch on YouTube here) is that Adams is fed up by passive linear TV--what the film calls "the sort of television that just happens at you, that you just sit in front of like a couch potato." Seeking a more interactive form of media, Adams takes his TV to a dump, where he meets Tom (played by Tom Baker). Tom is a software agent--essentially, a digital butler capable of personalizing your information and entertainment diet to your specific interests. Tom takes our protagonist through a virtual land of hypermedia--linked text, sounds, images, and videos. In other words, Tom takes Adams on a journey through the internet.

Last spring, an artificial intelligence lab called OpenAI unveiled technology that lets you create digital images simply by describing what you want to see. Called DALL-E, it sparked a wave of similar tools with names like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Promising to speed the work of digital artists, this new breed of AI captured the imagination of both the public and the pundits -- and threatened to generate new levels of online disinformation. Social media is now teeming with the surprisingly conceptual, in which shockingly detailed, often photorealistic images are generated by DALL-E and other tools. "Photo of a teddy bear riding a skateboard in Times Square." "Cute corgi in a house made out of sushi."

When ChatGPT--the ingenious, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged chatbot from OpenAI--was asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its responses included: "It is likely that its worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more." Microsoft, which is rumored to be weighing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI on top of an earlier $1 billion commitment, is betting that the company is worth a lot more--despite the fact neither ChatGPT nor other AI models made by OpenAI are yet raking in huge amounts of cash. OpenAI has built several impressive and attention-grabbing demos and powers a popular autocomplete function for coders offered by Microsoft's GitHub. But despite the hype swirling around its technology, the startup hasn't created a breakout, highly lucrative product or business. Cham compares the current situation to the early days of the Internet, when some obscure but evocative demos turned out to precede a sea change in the workings of software, tech companies, and wider society.

DALL-E is a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model developed by OpenAI that can generate images from textual descriptions.

ChatGPT, OpenAI's free chatbot based on GPT-3.5, was released on 30 November 2022 and racked up a million users in five days. It is capable of writing emails, essays, code and phishing emails, if the user knows how to ask. By comparison, it took Twitter two years to reach a million users. Facebook took ten months, Dropbox seven months, Spotify five months, Instagram six weeks. Pokemon Go took ten hours, so don't break out the champagne bottles, but still, five days is pretty impressive for a web-based tool that didn't have any built-in name recognition.

'Leaving aside the very real ramifications of robots displacing artists who are already underpaid, we believe that AI art devalues the act of artistic creation for both the artist and the public'

Using a pretrained AI model from Nvidia, startup Evozyne has created two proteins with significant potential in healthcare and clean energy. A joint paper released today describes the process and the biological building blocks it produced. One aims to cure a congenital disease, another is designed to consume carbon dioxide to reduce global warming. Initial results show a new way to accelerate drug discovery and more. "It's been really encouraging that even in this first round the AI model has produced synthetic proteins as good as naturally occurring ones," says Andrew Ferguson, Evozyne's co-founder and a co-author of the paper.

Microsoft is discussing a potential $10 billion investment in ChatGPT founder OpenAI that will boost its value to $29 billion. The AI tool has dazzled many people worldwide due to its uncanny ability to generate text while mimicking human speech. According to Reuters, OpenAI told investors last month it expects $200 million in revenue in 2023 and a billion dollars by 2024. Most people know Microsoft as the creator of MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. Meanwhile, OpenAI is an artificial intelligence laboratory made popular by ChatGPT.

Russian cyber-criminals have been observed on dark web forums trying to bypass OpenAI's API restrictions to gain access to the ChatGPT chatbot for nefarious purposes. Various individuals have been observed, for instance, discussing how to use stolen payment cards to pay for upgraded users on OpenAI (thus circumventing the limitations of free accounts). Others have created blog posts on how to bypass the geo controls of OpenAI, and others still have created tutorials explaining how to use semi-legal online SMS services to register to ChatGPT. "Generally, there are a lot of tutorials in Russian semi-legal online SMS services on how to use it to register to ChatGPT, and we have examples that it is already being used," wrote Check Point Research (CPR), which shared the findings with Infosecurity ahead of publication. "It is not extremely difficult to bypass OpenAI's restricting measures for specific countries to access ChatGPT," said Sergey Shykevich, threat intelligence group manager at Check Point Software Technologies.

DALL-E 2 is artificial intelligence software that can turn anything you type into art, in any style. You want a portrait of a panda in the style of Renoir? Try this! Said one woman, "That is frightening and fascinating all at the same time!" I've even used it to illustrate "Sunday Morning" stories. DALL-E 2 and its rivals, like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, are available to anyone; they're inexpensive, or even free, to use.