Ten years ago, AlphaGo trounced human competitors--and its legacy is still present in today's most advanced bots. Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo--a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself. When Graepel faced it, AlphaGo was just a "baby" project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still took him down.

The company's sudden decision to pull the plug on Sora is a sign of deeper trouble. When I opened Sora this morning, I was met with a flood of strange and disturbing AI-generated videos. On OpenAI's video app, I scrolled through fabricated scenes of the Iran war and a barrage of fake Donald Trumps blabbering about Jeffrey Epstein. In my least favorite clip, I watched a man deep-fry an infant. The app lets users create fairly realistic-looking AI-generated clips--including of their own likeness--and then post them on a TikTok-like feed.

Why is Anthropic sponsoring an exhibition about Monet? Shower thoughts are typically best left in the shower. Such as: What might Claude the AI chatbot have to say about Claude Monet? Earlier this month, San Francisco's de Young Museum unveiled its newest exhibition, "Monet and Venice," which is dedicated to the impressionist painter's beautiful and meditative canvases of the floating city. And Anthropic, perhaps having seized on a marketing opportunity, is one of the show's lead sponsors.

Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours. In April 2024, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a current AI evangelist, gave a closed-door lecture to a group of Stanford students. If these young people hoped to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Schmidt explained, then they should be prepared to breach some ethical boundaries. Yet Schmidt told the students to go ahead and download whatever they need to build an accurate "test" version of their AI product. If the product takes off, "then you hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up," he said.

Why can't language models write well? I n a certain, strange way, generative AI peaked with OpenAI's GPT-2 seven years ago. Little known to anyone outside of tech circles, GPT-2 excelled at producing unexpected answers. "You could be like, 'Continue this story:,' and GPT-2 would be like, ','" Katy Gero, a poet and computer scientist who has been experimenting with language models since 2017, told me. "The models won't do that anymore." AI leaders boast about their models' superhuman technical abilities.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. T he smell was strange . The concrete wall was too close. One of my kids was standing on the sidewalk next to our car--not crying, just confused. The seat belt had held. The crumple zone had crumpled.

This story appears in the April 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world. Three Mile Island's cooling towers have until recently served as grave markers for America's nuclear-power industry. A s we drove through southwest Memphis, KeShaun Pearson told me to keep my window down--our destination was best tasted, not viewed. Along the way, we passed an abandoned coal plant to our right, then an active power plant to our left, equipped with enormous natural-gas turbines. Pearson, who directs the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, was bringing me to his hometown's latest industrial megaproject.

A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats--and a bunch of other random people, including me. T o me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion's 1987 book,, which begins like this: "Havana vanities come to dust in Miami." I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact.

An AI crash could bring down the economy. Some in the tech world think that's the price of progress. The tech billionaire Hemant Taneja admits that AI is a bubble. In fact, he welcomes it: "Bubbles are good," Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst, a venture-capital firm, told me in an email. If AI comes crashing down, it will lead to "some spectacular failures," he said--companies will go under and people will lose their jobs--but that's a price worth paying for "enduring companies that change the world forever."

It came earlier than expected. More than a year before his recent standoff with the Pentagon, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published a 15,000-word manifesto describing a glorious AI future. Its title, "Machines of Loving Grace," is borrowed from a Richard Brautigan poem, but as Amodei acknowledged, with some embarrassment, its utopian vision bears some resemblance to science fiction. According to Amodei, we will soon create the first polymath AIs with abilities that surpass those of Nobel Prize winners in "most relevant fields," and we'll have millions of them, a "country of geniuses," all packed into the glowing server racks of a data center, working together. With access to tools that operate directly on our physical world, these AIs would be able to get up to a great deal of dangerous mischief, but according to Amodei, if they're developed--or "grown," as staffers at Anthropic are fond of saying--in the correct way, they will decide to greatly improve our lives. Amodei does not explain precisely how the AIs will accomplish this.