The Download: the minerals powering our economy, and Chinese companies' identity crisis

It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with a new version of OpenAI's text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps, or a corgi made of pizza. Now they just had to figure out what to do with it. Nobody could have predicted just how big a splash this product was going to make. The rapid release of other generative models has inspired hundreds of newspaper headlines and magazine covers, filled social media with memes, kicked a hype machine into overdrive--and set off an intense backlash from creators.