Sam Altman is done with keyboards and screens. Earlier today, OpenAI announced its intentions to solve this apparent problem. The company is partnering with Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, who did pioneering work on products such as the iMac G3, the iPod, and, most famously, the iPhone. Together, Altman and Ive say they want to create hardware built specifically for AI software. Everyone, Altman suggested in a highly produced announcement video, could soon have access to a "team of geniuses"--presumably, ChatGPT-style assistants--on a "family of devices."

Large language models such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and DeepSeek can be so fluent that people feel it as a "you," and it answers encouragingly as an "I." The models can write poetry in nearly any given form, read a set of political speeches and promptly sift out and share all the jokes, draw a chart, code a website. How do they do these and so many other things that were just recently the sole realm of humans? Practitioners are left explaining jaw-dropping conversational rabbit-from-a-hat extractions with arm-waving that the models are just predicting one word at a time from an unthinkably large training set scraped from every recorded written or spoken human utterance that can be found--fair enough--or a with a small shrug and a cryptic utterance of "fine-tuning" or "transformers!" These aren't very satisfying answers for how these models can converse so intelligently, and how they sometimes err so weirdly.

At first glance, "Heat Index" appears as inoffensive as newspaper features get. A "summer guide" sprawling across more than 50 pages, the feature, which was syndicated over the past week in both the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, contains "303 Must-Dos, Must-Tastes, and Must-Tries" for the sweaty months ahead. Readers are advised in one section to "Take a moonlight hike on a well-marked trail" and "Fly a kite on a breezy afternoon." In others, they receive tips about running a lemonade stand and enjoying "unexpected frozen treats." Yet close readers of the guide noticed that something was very off.

On a recent commute to work, I texted my distant family about our fantasy baseball league, which was nice because I felt connected to them for a second. Then I switched apps and became enraged by a stupid opinion I saw on X, which I shouldn't be using anymore due to its advanced toxicity and mind-numbing inanity. Many minutes passed before I was able to stop reading the stupid replies to the stupid original post and relax the muscles of my face. This is the duality of the phone: It connects me to my loved ones, and sometimes I think it's ruining my life. I need it and I want it, but sometimes I hate it and I fear it.

In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable--now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking. To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?

Yesterday, a user on X saw a viral post of Timothée Chalamet celebrating courtside at a Knicks game and had a simple question: Who was sitting next to him? The user tapped in Grok, X's proprietary chatbot, as people often do when they want help answering questions on the platform--the software functions like ChatGPT, except it can be summoned via reply to a post. And for the most part, Grok has performed reasonably well at providing responses. Chalamet was sitting with Kylie and Kendall Jenner, but here is how the chatbot replied: "I believe you're referring to a photo with Timothée Chalamet, but the context you mention doesn't seem to align with this image. The post discusses South African politics, which doesn't relate to Timothée or the people around him."

On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane--which was, thankfully, empty--and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was delivering a speech criticizing President Donald Trump's economic policies, and in particular the administration's sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs. A day earlier, the White House had claimed that Chinese goods would be subject to overall levies as high as 245 percent when accounting for preexisting tariffs, and the AI giant Nvidia's stock had plummeted after the company reported that it expected to take a quarterly hit of more than 5 billion for selling to China.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI pulled off one of the greatest corporate promotions in recent memory. Whereas the initial launch of ChatGPT, back in 2022, was "one of the craziest viral moments i'd ever seen," CEO Sam Altman wrote on social media, the response to a new upgrade was, in his words, "biblical": 1 million users supposedly signed up to use the chatbot in just one hour, Altman reported, thanks to a new, more permissive image-generating capability that could imitate the styles of various art and design studios. Altman called it "a new high-water mark for us in allowing creative freedom." Almost immediately, images began to flood the internet. The most popular style, by a long shot, was that of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki and widely beloved for films such as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke.

Recently, after an update that was supposed to make ChatGPT "better at guiding conversations toward productive outcomes," according to release notes from OpenAI, the bot couldn't stop telling users how brilliant their bad ideas were. ChatGPT reportedly told one person that their plan to sell literal "shit on a stick" was "not just smart--it's genius." Many more examples cropped up, and OpenAI rolled back the product in response, explaining in a blog post that "the update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable--often described as sycophantic." The company added that the chatbot's system would be refined and new guardrails would be put into place to avoid "uncomfortable, unsettling" interactions. But this was not just a ChatGPT problem. Sycophancy is a common feature of chatbots: A 2023 paper by researchers from Anthropic found that it was a "general behavior of state-of-the-art AI assistants," and that large language models sometimes sacrifice "truthfulness" to align with a user's views.

In at least one crucial way, AI has already won its campaign for global dominance. An unbelievable volume of synthetic prose is published every moment of every day--heaping piles of machine-written news articles, text messages, emails, search results, customer-service chats, even scientific research. Chatbots learned from human writing. Now the influence may run in the other direction. Some people have hypothesized that the proliferation of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT will seep into human communication, that the terse language we use when prompting a chatbot may lead us to dispose of any niceties or writerly flourishes when corresponding with friends and colleagues.