The Download: living for longer, and sex in the age of AI

The open-source AI boom is built on Big Tech's handouts. In May 2023 a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech's grip on AI. New open-source large language models--alternatives to Google's Bard or OpenAI's ChatGPT that researchers and app developers can study, build on, and modify--are dropping like candy from a piñata. These are smaller, cheaper versions of the best-in-class AI models created by the big firms that (almost) match them in performance--and they're shared for free. AI won't thrive if just a few mega-rich companies get to gatekeep this technology or decide how it is used.