Among all the images of people cozying up to President Donald Trump at today's inauguration, one in particular will be worth remembering over the next four years. During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, you could see some of the most powerful men on the planet positioned immediately behind members of the Trump family on the dais. There's Tiffany, there's Eric, there are Ivanka and Don Jr., and then, smiling and clapping right alongside the family, there are the tech titans: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook. In visual proximity, they're as close to honorary Trumps as anyone could be. The power that each of these men represents may be rivaled by only the presidency itself.

The human cell is a miserable thing to study. Tens of trillions of them exist in the body, forming an enormous and intricate network that governs every disease and metabolic process. Each cell in that circuit is itself the product of an equally dense and complex interplay among genes, proteins, and other bits of profoundly small biological machinery. Our understanding of this world is hazy and constantly in flux. As recently as a few years ago, scientists thought there were only a few hundred distinct cell types, but new technologies have revealed thousands (and that's just the start).

For more than two years, every new AI announcement has lived in the shadow of ChatGPT. No model from any company has eclipsed or matched that initial fever. But perhaps the closest any firm has come to replicating the buzz was this past February, when OpenAI first teased its video-generating AI model, Sora. Tantalizing clips--woolly mammoths kicking up clouds of snow, Pixar-esque animations of adorable fluffy critters--promised a stunning future, one in which anyone can whip up high-quality clips by typing simple text prompts into a computer program. But Sora, which was not immediately available to the public, remained just that: a teaser.

This week, OpenAI launched what its chief executive, Sam Altman, called "the smartest model in the world"--a generative-AI program whose capabilities are supposedly far greater, and more closely approximate how humans think, than those of any such software preceding it. The start-up has been building toward this moment since September 12, a day that, in OpenAI's telling, set the world on a new path toward superintelligence. That was when the company previewed early versions of a series of AI models, known as o1, constructed with novel methods that the start-up believes will propel its programs to unseen heights. Mark Chen, then OpenAI's vice president of research, told me a few days later that o1 is fundamentally different from the standard ChatGPT because it can "reason," a hallmark of human intelligence. Shortly thereafter, Altman pronounced "the dawn of the Intelligence Age," in which AI helps humankind fix the climate and colonize space. As of yesterday afternoon, the start-up has released the first complete version of o1, with fully fledged reasoning powers, to the public.

For almost two years now, the world's biggest tech companies have been at war over generative AI. Meta may be known for social media, Google for search, and Amazon for online shopping, but since the release of ChatGPT, each has made tremendous investments in an attempt to dominate in this new era. Along with start-ups such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, their spending on data centers and chatbots is on track to eclipse the costs of sending the first astronauts to the moon. To be successful, these companies will have to do more than build the most "intelligent" software: They will need people to use, and return to, their products. Everyone wants to be Facebook, and nobody wants to be Friendster.

For nearly two years, the world's biggest tech companies have said that AI will transform the web, your life, and the world. But first, they are remaking the humble search engine. Chatbots and search, in theory, are a perfect match. A standard Google search interprets a query and pulls up relevant results; tech companies have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars engineering chatbots that interpret human inputs, synthesize information, and provide fluent, useful responses. No more keyword refining or scouring Wikipedia--ChatGPT will do it all.

If the presidential election has provided relief from anything, it has been the generative-AI boom. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has made much of the technology in their public messaging, and they have not articulated particularly detailed AI platforms. Bots do not seem to rank among the economy, immigration, abortion rights, and other issues that can make or break campaigns. Americans are very invested, and very worried, about the future of artificial intelligence. Polling consistently shows that a majority of adults from both major parties support government regulation of AI, and that demand for regulation might even be growing.

Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world. But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical. Founded in Irvine, California, by two UCLA students named Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, the company quickly became well respected and popular thanks to a series of breakout franchises such as StarCraft and Diablo. But everything changed in 2004 with the launch of World of Warcraft (or WoW), which became an online-gaming juggernaut that made billions of dollars.

Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence. The "Mozart of Math," as he is sometimes called, is widely considered the world's greatest living mathematician. He has won numerous awards, including the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, for his advances and proofs. Right now, AI is nowhere close to his level. But technology companies are trying to get it there.

OpenAI announced this week that it has raised 6.6 billion in new funding and that the company is now valued at 157 billion overall. This is quite a feat for an organization that reportedly burns through 7 billion a year--far more cash than it brings in--but it makes sense when you realize that OpenAI's primary product isn't technology. Case in point: Last week, CEO Sam Altman published an online manifesto titled "The Intelligence Age." In it, he declares that the AI revolution is on the verge of unleashing boundless prosperity and radically improving human life. "We'll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI," he writes.