As I scour 35 to 40 websites a day to make sure I'm up to speed on the tech world, I'm seeing a common theme: drama. While everyone from Elon Musk to The New York Times is busy suing OpenAI, I'm just focused on whether these AI chatbots actually work. So, how useful are they, really? I did the work for you. I compared the free versions of ChatGPT from OpenAI, Google Gemini and Perplexity to see how well they helped with some real-life scenarios.

Chinese and American tech giants are preparing for a showdown that may shape the future of artificial intelligence. China's cloud providers, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, are getting ready to do battle with US giants Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to deliver AI online. As Chinese companies seek to expand their reach, they may increasingly aim their cloud services at US companies and developers, and vice versa. Speaking at EmTech China, an event held by MIT Technology Review in Beijing, Jian Wang, president of Alibaba's technology committee and a senior figure at the company, predicted that cloud AI would become a major trend. "I'm convinced that AI or machine learning will be the major consumer of applications [in the cloud]," Wang said through a translator.

Will AI render human analysts obsolete, or be an extension that helps them be more effective? Are we headed for an AI showdown? Here's the lay of the land in AI territory now. The buzz on artificial intelligence (AI) is deafening. Depending on who is hawking what, AI is either vastly superior to mere mortals, or it's the machine version of a friendly helper not much smarter than its furry, doggy counterpart.