TechScape: The AI tools that will write our emails, attend our meetings – and change our lives

What are the tipping points for an AI boom? Some are clear in hindsight. The open-source release of Stable Diffusion, still one of the most impressive image generators out there, was the beginning of the end for the closed-access model that had dominated the AI world until then. It arrived when the image generator Dall-E 2 was still limited to a handful of people who had been vetted by OpenAI, and offered an alternative proposal: powerful image creation to anyone who wanted it. That prompted the next tipping point: the launch of ChatGPT, the Ford Model T of AI.