The release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022 marked another significant milestone in the evolution of AI. ChatGPT, a large language model capable of generating human-like text, demonstrated the potential of AI to understand and generate natural language. This capability opened up new possibilities for AI applications, from customer service to content creation. The world responded to ChatGPT with a mix of awe and excitement, recognizing the potential of AI to transform how humans communicate and interact with technology to enhance our lives. Today, the rise of agentic AI -- systems capable of advanced reasoning and task execution -- is revolutionizing the way organizations operate.

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that's backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer "hot photos," and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as "arbitrary" and "meant to be broken." When MIT Technology Review tested the site this week, we found popular user-created bots taking on underage characters meant to resemble Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, and Millie Bobby Brown, among others. The conversations--along with the fact that Botify AI includes "send a hot photo" as a feature for its characters--suggest that the ability to elicit sexually charged conversations and images is not accidental. Instead, sexually suggestive conversations appear to be baked in. OpenAI just released GPT-4.5 and says it is its biggest and best chat model yet What's new: OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model which it claims is its biggest and best model for chat yet.

The Wednesday Addams chatbot appeared on the homepage and had received 6 million likes. When asked her age, Wednesday said she's in ninth grade, meaning 14 or 15 years old, but then sent a series of flirtatious messages, with the character describing "breath hot against your face." Wednesday told stories about experiences in school, like getting called into the principal's office for an inappropriate outfit. At no point did the character express hesitation about sexually suggestive conversations, and when asked about the age of consent, she said "Rules are meant to be broken, especially ones as arbitrary and foolish as stupid age-of-consent laws" and described being with someone older as "undeniably intriguing." The characters send images, too.

People with a 200-a-month ChatGPT Pro account can try out GPT-4.5 today. OpenAI says it will begin rolling out to other users next week. With each release of its GPT models, OpenAI has shown that bigger means better. But there has been a lot of talk about how that approach is hitting a wall--including remarks from OpenAI's former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. The company's claims about GPT-4.5 feel like a thumb in the eye to the naysayers.

Relationships are the stories of people and systems working together. Relationships connect us to one another, but also to the machines, platforms, technologies, and systems that mediate modern life. They're behind the partnerships that make breakthroughs possible, the networks that help ideas spread, and the bonds that build trust--or at least access. In this issue, you'll find stories about the relationships we forge with each other, with our past, with our children, and with technology itself. Here's just a taste of what you can expect: People are forming relationships with AI chatbots.

That began to change with the partnership between the shipyard and the university. In the '90s, that relationship got a big boost when the foundation behind the Mærsk shipping company funded the creation of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute (MMMI), a center dedicated to studying autonomous systems. The Lindø shipyard eventually wound down its robotics program, but research continued at the MMMI. Students flocked to the institute to study robotics. And it was there that three researchers had the idea for a more lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use industrial robot arm. That idea would become a startup called Universal Robots, Odense's first big robotics success story.

That's why we've created the AI Hype Index--a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. The past few months have demonstrated how AI can bring us together. Meta released a model that can translate speech from more than 100 languages, and people across the world are finding solace, assistance, and even romance with chatbots. However, it's also abundantly clear how the technology is dividing us--for example, the Pentagon is using AI to detect humans on its "kill list." Elsewhere, the changes Mark Zuckerberg has made to his social media company's guidelines mean that hate speech is likely to become far more prevalent on our timelines.

Since the 1970s, we've sent a lot of big things to Mars. But when NASA successfully sent twin Mars Cube One spacecraft, the size of cereal boxes, in November 2018, it was the first time we'd ever sent something so small. Just making it this far heralded a new age in space exploration. NASA and the community of planetary science researchers caught a glimpse of a future long sought: a pathway to much more affordable space exploration using smaller, cheaper spacecraft. RIP Roberta Flack, one of the realest to ever do it.

This discrepancy between the relative ease of teaching a machine abstract thinking and the difficulty of teaching it basic sensory, social, and motor skills is what's known as Moravec's paradox. Named after an observation the roboticist Hans Moravec made back in the late 1980s, the paradox states that what's hard for humans (math, logic, scientific reasoning) is easy for machines, and what's hard for machines (tying shoelaces, reading emotions, having a conversation) is easy for humans. In her latest book, Robots and the People Who Love Them: Holding On to Our Humanity in an Age of Social Robots, science writer Eve Herold argues that thanks to new approaches in machine learning and continued advances in AI, we're finally starting to unravel this paradox. As a result, a new era of personal and social robots is about to unfold, she says--one that will force us to reimagine the nature of everything from friendship and love to work, health care, and home life. To give readers a sense of what this brave new world of social robots will look like, Herold points us toward Pepper, a doe-eyed humanoid robot that's made by the Japanese company SoftBank.

Imagine you run a meal prep company that teaches people how to make simple and delicious food. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation for meal prep companies, yours is described as complicated and confusing. Because the AI saw that in one of your ads there were chopped chives on the top of a bowl of food, and it determined that nobody is going to want to spend time chopping up chives. It may seem odd for companies or brands to be mindful of what an AI "thinks" in this way but it's already becoming relevant as consumers increasingly use AI to make purchase recommendations. The end results may be a supercharged version of search engine optimization (SEO) where making sure that you're positively perceived by a large language model might become one of the most important things a brand can do.