In the era of search wars fought between giants, it's tough to be small. Berlin-based Ecosia offers a search engine for the climate-conscious, promising to be carbon-negative by investing all of its profits into planting trees--more than 180 million of them since it launched in 2009. It's not likely to topple Google, but it has won a stable clientele of around 20 million users with that green branding and by repackaging search results from Microsoft's Bing. But after a decade of little change in the search business, everything is now in flux, thanks to generative AI. "I've never seen so much change in the market as in the last six months," says Christian Kroll, Ecosia's CEO. The tumult has forced Ecosia to rethink its business plan in order to compete with new chatbot-like search engines built on large language models.

After years of anticipation and contributions from thousands of people, Apple Vision Pro made its debut yesterday, promising immersion in apps, games, movies, and the workplace. With more than 20 cameras, sensors, and microphones, two processing chips, and even an external battery you carry in your pocket, it's packed full of world-class tech, but missing an element that seems to be everywhere else right now: Generative AI. Since the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT last fall, generative AI that creates text and imagery from simple prompts triggered calls for regulation and fear of an existential threat to humanity, and continues to play a role in ongoing Hollywood writers union strikes. It's also led Big Tech companies to speed up AI deployments, but not at Apple. Yesterday Apple announced new features powered by its neural engine hardware--like call screening that transcribes the first few words of a voicemail live so you can decide whether to pick up a call--but there was no mention of generative AI during the two-hour Worldwide Developer Conference keynote address.

ChatGPT is all the tech world can talk about lately, and with good reason. But there are also starry-eyed tech companies who see the future–the ability for computers to converse naturally and create content that businesses can actually use, at a scale, speed, and cost humans can't possibly match. But ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft's Bing chat are just one small part of the generative AI revolution. These tools aren't just a flash in the pan. Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft see this new generative AI as a massive part of all our futures.

To understand how radically gaming is about to be transformed by Generative AI, look no further than this recent Twitter post by @emmanuel_2m. In this post he explores using Stable Diffusion Dreambooth, popular 2D Generative AI models, to generate images of potions for a hypothetical game. What's transformative about this work is not just that it saves time and money while also delivering quality – thus smashing the classic "you can only have two of cost, quality, or speed" triangle. Artists are now creating high-quality images in a matter of hours that would otherwise take weeks to generate by hand. What's truly transformative is that: There hasn't been a technology this revolutionary for gaming since real-time 3D. Spend any time at all talking to game creators, and the sense of excitement and wonder is palpable. So where is this technology going? And how will it transform gaming?

A lack of balance between those poles (in whichever direction) produces different kinds of issues in adults. I have written extensively about those matters, but that is not the topic of this article. Let's get back to the artists. Many great artists have the following thing in common. They are able to navigate this depth elevator in an agile and flexible way.