Three years after ChatGPT made OpenAI the leader in artificial intelligence and a household name, rivals have closed the gap and some investors are wondering if the sensation has the wherewithal to stay dominant. Investor Michael Burry, made famous in the film The Big Short, recently likened OpenAI to Netscape, which ruled the web-browser market in the mid-1990s only to lose to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. OpenAI is the next Netscape, doomed and hemorrhaging cash, Burry said recently in a post on X, formerly Twitter. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Hannah Wong told staff she is moving on to her “next chapter.” The company will be running an executive search to find a replacement, according to a memo.

PCWorld reports that LG TV owners discovered a Microsoft Copilot app on their smart TVs after a webOS update that cannot be uninstalled. The app stems from LG's partnership with Microsoft for AI TV features, currently functioning as a web shortcut for AI search and recommendations. While users can hide Copilot from their home screen, the inability to completely remove the pre-installed app has frustrated many owners. LG TV owners are expressing confusion and annoyance online after Microsoft Copilot suddenly appeared on their smart TVs, with no option to uninstall the app, Tom's Hardware reports. Copilot was reportedly added to some LG models in conjunction with a recent webOS update and subsequently appears pinned to the home screen.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I thought AI would replace Photoshop. Here's why I still do it myself Now that the novelty of generative AI is wearing off, it's clear that there are some serious limitations. When ChatGPT first debuted, I thought my days as a writer were numbered. There are so many things it can do, and I imagine artists have had similar pangs of fearful panic as generative AI keeps getting ever better at creating lifelike and/or stylized images.

The Roomba maker is considering handing over control to its main Chinese supplier.

AI might not be coming for lawyers' jobs anytime soon Generative AI might have aced the bar exam, but an LLM still can't think like a lawyer. When the generative AI boom took off in 2022, Rudi Miller and her law school classmates were suddenly gripped with anxiety. "Before graduating, there was discussion about what the job market would look like for us if AI became adopted," she recalls. So when it came time to choose a speciality, Miller--now a junior associate at the law firm Orrick--decided to become a litigator, the kind of lawyer who represents clients in court. She hoped the courtroom would be the last human stage. "Judges haven't allowed ChatGPT-enabled robots to argue in court yet," she says.

AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced. Developers are navigating confusing gaps between expectation and reality. So are the rest of us. Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it's not easy to know which is true. As tech giants pour billions into large language models (LLMs), coding has been touted as the technology's killer app. Both Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have claimed that around a quarter of their companies' code is now AI-generated. And in March, Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, predicted that within six months 90% of all code would be written by AI.

Four ways to think about this year's reckoning When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry--and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more. Technology companies scrambled to stay ahead, putting out rival products that outdid one another with each new release: voice, images, video. With nonstop one-upmanship, AI companies have presented each new product drop as a major breakthrough, reinforcing a widespread faith that this technology would just keep getting better. Boosters told us that progress was exponential.

Startups flush with cash are building AI-assisted laboratories to find materials far faster and more cheaply, but are still waiting for their ChatGPT moment. The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn't look all that different from others that I've seen in state-of-the-art materials labs. Inside its vacuum chamber, the machine zaps a palette of different elements to create vaporized particles, which then fly through the chamber and land to create a thin film, using a technique called sputtering. What sets this instrument apart is that artificial intelligence is running the experiment; an AI agent, trained on vast amounts of scientific literature and data, has determined the recipe and is varying the combination of elements. Later, a person will walk the samples, each containing multiple potential catalysts, over to a different part of the lab for testing. Another AI agent will scan and interpret the data, using it to suggest another round of experiments to try to optimize the materials' performance. For now, a human scientist keeps a close eye on the experiments and will approve the next steps on the basis of the AI's suggestions and the test results. But the startup is convinced this AI-controlled machine is a peek into the future of materials discovery--one in which autonomous labs could make it far cheaper and faster to come up with novel and useful compounds. Flush with hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding, Lila Sciences is one of AI's latest unicorns.

Here's how pinning a utopian vision for AI on LLMs kicked off the hype cycle that's causing fears of a bubble today. Each time you've heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it. For more than a decade he has been known in Silicon Valley as a world-class fundraiser and persuader. OpenAI's early releases around 2020 set the stage for a mania around large language models, and the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 granted Altman a world stage on which to present his new thesis: that these models mirror human intelligence and could swing the doors open to a healthier and wealthier techno-utopia. Throughout, Altman's words have set the agenda. He has framed a prospective superintelligent AI as either humanistic or catastrophic, depending on what effect he was hoping to create, what he was raising money for, or which tech giant seemed like his most formidable competitor at the moment.