Conversations about the future of AI are too apocalyptic. Or rather, they focus on the wrong kind of apocalypse. There is considerable concern of the future of AI, especially as a number of prominent computer scientists have raised, the risks of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)--an AI smarter than a human being. They worry that an AGI will lead to mass unemployment or that AI will grow beyond human control--or worse (the movies Terminator and 2001 come to mind). Discussing these concerns seems important, as does thinking about the much more mundane and immediate threats of misinformation, deep fakes, and proliferation enabled by AI.

Elon Musk has announced new changes to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that will allow certain accounts to unlock free premium features. Posting on the platform Thursday, the 52-year old tech billionaire, and TIME's 2021 Person of the Year, said: "Going forward, all X accounts with over 2500 verified subscriber followers will get Premium features for free and accounts with over 5000 will get Premium for free." Previously, X Premium features would cost a user 8 per month and include the ability to share longer posts and video uploads, have larger reply prioritization, and see fewer adverts on their timeline. Meanwhile X Premium users have all the features of Premium with no adverts in the For You and Following timelines, as well as access to generative artificial intelligence chatbot Grok. These models are the only way users can now display a blue checkmark that once denoted a verified account before the Tesla and SpaceX CEO acquired Twitter Inc for 44bn in April 2022.

U.S. government spending on artificial intelligence has exploded in the past year, driven by increased military investments, according to a report by the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington D.C. The report found that the potential value of AI-related federal contracts increased by almost 1,200%, from 355 million in the period leading up to August 2022, to 4.6 billion in the period leading up to August 2023. This increase was almost entirely driven by the Department of Defense (DoD). The total amount committed by the DoD to AI-related contracts increased from 190 million in the period leading up to August 2022 to 557 million in the period leading up to August 2023. The total that the DoD might spend on AI-related contracts if each contract were extended to its fullest terms grew even faster, from 269 million in the period leading up to August 2022 to 4.3 billion in the period leading up to August 2023.

Leaders of AI companies often argue that AI products will handle mundane tasks, freeing people up to be more productive and creative. And there are few tasks more mundane than taxes. An individual American taxpayer spends roughly 13 hours and 240 out-of-pocket costs just to prepare and file one annual tax return, according to one 2022 study--an estimated 1.15 billion hours collectively spent on tax preparation. So it's not surprising that tax companies have begun rolling out AI-powered tools in an effort to make filing easier. AI-powered tax software, these companies argue, can automate repetitive tasks like data entry, cull through patterns in order to find relevant tax breaks, identify potential compliance risks, and answer tricky questions that filers may have.

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As predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano, recent breakthroughs in AI have been accompanied by a new wave of fears of some version of "the singularity," that point in runaway technological innovation at which computers become unleashed from human control. Those worried that AI is going to toss us humans into the dumpster, however, might look to the natural world for perspective on what current AI can and cannot do. Those octopi alive today are a marvel of evolution--they can mold themselves into almost any shape and are equipped with an arsenal of weapons and stealth camouflage, as well as an apparent ability to decide which to use depending on the challenge. Yet, despite decades of effort, robotics hasn't come close to duplicating this suite of abilities (not surprising since the modern octopus is the product of adaptations over 100 million generations). Robotics is a far longer way off from creating Hal.

Beth Barnes and three of her colleagues sit cross-legged in a semicircle on a damp lawn on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. They are describing their attempts to interrogate artificial intelligence chatbots. "They are, in some sense, these vast alien intelligences," says Barnes, 26, who is the founder and CEO of Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), an AI-safety nonprofit. "They know so much about whether the next word is going to be'is' versus'was.' We're just playing with a tiny bit on the surface, and there's all this, miles and miles underneath," she says, gesturing at the potentially immense depths of large language models' capabilities. Researchers at METR look a lot like Berkeley students--the four on the lawn are in their twenties and dressed in jeans or sweatpants.

"Do you think people will ever fall in love with machines?" I asked the 12-year-old son of one of my friends. "Yes!" he said, instantly and with conviction. He and his sister had recently visited the Las Vegas Sphere and its newly installed Aura robot--an AI system with an expressive face, advanced linguistic capacities similar to ChatGPT, and the ability to remember visitors' names. "I think of Aura as my friend," added his 15-year-old sister.

At an AI research lab on the edges of Abu Dhabi last year, an international team of 25 computer scientists were putting the finishing touches on a deep learning algorithm before sending it to be trained on 4,000 powerful computer chips. The AI system, which cost several million dollars to train, was funded by an arm of the Abu Dhabi government called the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). Despite the government's substantial investment, ATRC director Faisal Al Bannai decided to release the finished model online for free. If it was as good as the team believed, the boost to the United Arab Emirates' reputation would be all the return the government needed on its investment, he reasoned. When the AI, named Falcon after the UAE's national bird, was publicly released last September, it became a sensation. By some measures it was the best open-source large language model (LLM) available in the world at that point, outperforming top offerings from Meta and Google.

For centuries it was biology that made humans sick. Today, it is often stress. So argues Dr Gabor Maté about the unrecognized toll that "normal" modern life has on your mental and physical health. Dr. Maté's research, which struck a chord in 2023, invites reflection on the roll out of generative AI into daily life in 2024. As half of British teens report feeling addicted to social media, and as the U.S. surgeon general offers a rare caution against its health risks, the infusion of generative AI into social media appears to threaten our basic hygiene, meaning "the conditions or practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease."