This Is What It Looks Like When AI Eats the World

Tech evangelists like to say that AI will eat the world--a reference to a famous line about software from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In the past few weeks, we've finally gotten a sense of what they mean. This spring, tech companies have made clear that AI will be a defining feature of online life, whether people want it to be or not. First, Meta surprised users with an AI chatbot that lives in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook. It has since informed European users that their data are being used to train its AI--presumably sent only to comply with the continent's privacy laws. OpenAI released GPT-4o, billed as a new, more powerful and conversational version of its large language model.