Silicon Valley's 'Audacity Crisis'

Two years ago, OpenAI released the public beta of DALL-E 2, an image-generation tool that immediately signified that we'd entered a new technological era. Trained off a huge body of data, DALL-E 2 produced unsettlingly good, delightful, and frequently unexpected outputs; my Twitter feed filled up with images derived from prompts such as close-up photo of brushing teeth with toothbrush covered with nacho cheese. Suddenly, it seemed as though machines could create just about anything in response to simple prompts. You likely know the story from there: A few months later, ChatGPT arrived, millions of people started using it, the student essay was pronounced dead, Web3 entrepreneurs nearly broke their ankles scrambling to pivot their companies to AI, and the technology industry was consumed by hype. The generative-AI revolution began in earnest.