"I always thought AI was going to be way smarter than humans and an existential risk, and that's turning out to be true," Musk said in February, noting he thinks there is a 20% chance of human "annihilation" by AI. While estimates vary, the idea that advanced AI systems could destroy humanity traces back to the origin of many of the labs developing the technology today. In 2015, Altman called the development of superhuman machine intelligence "probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." Alongside Hassabis and Amodei, he signed a statement in May 2023 declaring that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." "It strikes me as odd that some leaders think that AI can be so brilliant that it will solve the world's problems, using solutions we didn't think of, but not so brilliant that it can't escape whatever control constraints we think of," says Margaret Mitchell, Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face.

"It's not going to completely replace the human element of putting your boot into the vineyard, and that's one of my favorite things to do," he said. "But it's going to be able to allow you to work more smartly, more intelligently and in the end, make better decisions under less fatigue." Gamble said he anticipates using the tech as much as possible because of "economic, air quality and regulatory imperatives." Autonomous tractors, he said, could help lower his fuel use and cut back on pollution. As AI continues to grow, experts say that the wine industry is proof that businesses can integrate the technology efficiently to supplement labor without displacing a workforce.

"It reflects the broader competitiveness of China's frontier AI ecosystem," says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That ecosystem includes DeepSeek's R1 and Tencent's Hunyuan model, which Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said is by some measures "world-class." That said, assessments of Alibaba's latest model are preliminary, both due to the inherent challenge of measuring model capabilities, and because so far, the model has only been assessed by Alibaba itself. "The information environment is not very rich right now," says Singer. Since the release of DeepSeek's R1 model in January sent waves through the global stock market, China's tech ecosystem has been in the spotlight--particularly as the U.S. increasingly sees itself as racing against China to create artificial general intelligence (AGI)--highly advanced AI systems capable of performing most cognitive work, from graphic design to machine-learning research.

Recreating the species from that raw biological material is relatively straightforward in principle, if exceedingly painstaking in practice. The work involves pinpointing the genes responsible for the traits that separate the mammoth from the Asian elephant--its close evolutionary relation--editing an elephant stem cell to express those traits, and introducing the stem cell into an elephant embryo. In the alternative, scientists could edit a newly conceived Asian elephant zygote directly. Either way, the next step would be to implant the resulting embryo into the womb of a modern-day female elephant. After 22 months--the typical elephant gestation period--an ice age mammoth should, at least theoretically, be born into the computer-age world.

IBM was one of the giants of 20th-century computing. It helped design the modern PC, and created the first AI to defeat a human champion in the game of chess. But when you think of AI, IBM might not be the first, or even the tenth, company to spring to mind. "We are a B2B company, and explaining what we do to the average reader--we'll take all the help we can get," IBM CEO Arvind Krishna joked ahead of a recent interview with TIME. IBM does indeed build AI models--not massive ones like OpenAI's GPT4-o or Google's Gemini, but smaller ones designed for use in high-stakes settings, where accuracy comes at a premium.

As President Trump has announced varying tariffs over the last month, tech stock prices have dipped, with investors fearing broad impacts on different parts of the tech sector. Shares of NVIDIA, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and AMD have all wobbled, responding in part to news that Trump might implement a 25% tariff on semiconductors shipped to the U.S. The possible tariffs are said to be part of Trump's plan to try to get more semiconductor and AI-related manufacturing in the U.S. But industry insiders say that they're not yet changing any of their longterm approaches --and are mostly viewing the tariff threats as simply another input factor in a volatile industry whose prices are constantly shifting. "Tariffs are more of a blip as opposed to a strong headwind," says Scott Almassy, semiconductor lead at PwC. Nazar Khan, the COO and CTO of the data center company Terawulf, adds: "No one's really changing what they're doing because it's just too much guesswork." Trump's semiconductor tariffs could go into effect as early as April 2, he said.

I'm a psychologist, and AI is coming for my job. The signs are everywhere: a client showing me how ChatGPT helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; a friend ditching her in-person therapist to process anxiety with Claude; a startup raising 40 million to build a super-charged-AI-therapist. The other day on TikTok, I came across an influencer sharing how she doesn't need friends; she can just vent to God and ChatGPT. "ChatGPT talked me out of self-sabotaging." "It knows me better than any human walking this earth."

A couple of years ago, Grimes thought art might be dying. She worried that TikTok was overwhelming attention spans; that transgressive artists were becoming more sanitized; that gimmicky NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club--digital cartoon monkeys which were selling for millions of dollars--were warping value systems. "I just went through this whole big'art isn't worth anything' internal existential crisis," the Canadian singer-songwriter says. "But I've come out the other end thinking, actually, maybe it's the main thing that matters. In the last year, I feel like things became way more about artists again." The rise of AI, Grimes believes, has played a role in that shift, perhaps paradoxically. Earlier this month, Grimes was honored at the TIME100 AI Impact Awards in Dubai for her role in shaping the present and future of the technology. While many other artists are terrified of AI and its potential to replace them, Grimes has embraced the technology, even releasing an AI tool allowing people to sing through her voice. Grimes' penchant for seriously engaging with what others fear or distrust makes her one of pop culture's most singular--and at times divisive--figures. But Grimes wears her contrarianism as a badge of honor, and doesn't hesitate to offer insights and perspectives on a variety of issues. "I'm so canceled that I basically have nothing left to lose," she says. She argues that hyper-partisan hysteria has consumed social media, and wishes people would have more measured, nuanced conversations, even with people that they disagree with. "A lot of people think I'm one way or the other, but my whole vibe is just like, I just want people to think well," she says.

Complex games like chess and Go have long been used to test AI models' capabilities. But while IBM's Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s by playing by the rules, today's advanced AI models like OpenAI's o1-preview are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they don't always concede, instead sometimes opting to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game. That is the finding of a new study from Palisade Research, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication on Feb. 19, which evaluated seven state-of-the-art AI models for their propensity to hack. While slightly older AI models like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1 pursued the exploit on their own, indicating that AI systems may develop deceptive or manipulative strategies without explicit instruction.

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, has temporarily paused downloads of its chatbot apps in South Korea while it works with local authorities to address privacy concerns, according to South Korean officials on Monday. South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission said DeepSeek's apps were removed from the local versions of Apple's App Store and Google Play on Saturday evening and that the company agreed to work with the agency to strengthen privacy protections before relaunching the apps. Read More: Is the DeepSeek Panic Overblown? The action does not affect users who have already downloaded DeepSeek on their phones or use it on personal computers. Nam Seok, director of the South Korean commission's investigation division, advised South Korean users of DeepSeek to delete the app from their devices or avoid entering personal information into the tool until the issues are resolved.