The unprecedented popularity of ChatGPT has turbocharged the AI hype machine. We are being bombarded daily by news articles announcing humankind's greatest invention--Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is "qualitatively different," "transformational," "revolutionary," "will change everything,"--they say. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced a major upgrade of the technology behind ChatGPT called GPT4. Already, Microsoft researchers are claiming that GPT4 shows "sparks of Artificial General Intelligence" or human-like intelligence--the Holy grail of AI research.

Believe it or not, this issue marks a year of Pushing Buttons. However long you've been a subscriber, I wanted to say thank you so much for reading. Whether I've been chewing over the week's gaming news, philosophising over what games can offer us in times of crisis or just writing (again) about how brilliantly creepy Zelda: Majora's Mask is, putting this newsletter together has consistently been a highlight of my working week. I try to bring you a balance of analysis, opinion, reminiscence, recommendations and good old-fashioned journalistic storytelling, but if you have any thoughts on what you'd like to see more of in this newsletter, hit reply and tell me. And if there are any guest writers you'd like to see in your inbox in 2023, let me know who they are and I'll try to make it happen. When the first issue went out, the world was still emerging tentatively from Covid-19 lockdowns, when video games had been a vital social lifeline for millions.

Other partnerships focusing on early-stage discovery technologies include Insitro, started by Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. Attracting investments from a high-powered group of venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Third Rock, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Capital, Insitro plans to train machine learning models to help "address key problems in the drug discovery and development process," according to a blog post by Koller. The company's ambitious goal is to create a way to develop drugs that are cheaper, faster and have a higher success rate than traditional models. Doing her part to minimize over-promising claims, Koller noted in the post that she does not expect this approach to offer a "magic bullet" so much as add another option for drug developers.

If you search "Marketing and AI", Google returns almost four million results. Recent headlines range from the strategic - AI Will Make Marketing Less Manual (well, duh) – to the tactical, like 4 ways AI can improve email marketing. The hype machine is in full swing. This is a hot topic at my company, Conversion Logic, where we use machine learning algorithms for marketing attribution. It's tempting, from our own marketing perspective, to jump on the bandwagon and "AI-wash" our offering.

I occasionally meet with a company that worries they're not ready for bots. They think of bots as an emerging technology fraught with complexity. In some cases, they worry they don't have the skillset internally to deploy and get ROI out of the technology. Others want the technology to "mature" a bit more before they place a bet. If you really stop to think about it, it's a ridiculous question: "are we ready for bots?" Do you have customers and employees?

It's hard to believe this is my 10th annual predictions piece for VentureBeat. VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall asked me write my first prediction piece in 2007 for the year 2008. The tech landscape has changed a lot since then. In 2008, Microsoft offered $44.6 billion for Yahoo, and now Verizon could acquire Yahoo for $4.8 billlion. Cloud computing made its mark in 2008, back when no one could have imagined Amazon would be leading the space.

IN FROM three to eight years, we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level, and a few months after that, its powers will be incalculable. Such rumours of superhuman artificial intelligence have been doing the rounds lately, but this prediction doesn't come from AI oracles du jour Nick Bostrom or Elon Musk (New Scientist, 25 June, p 18). It was made in 1970 by the man widely considered to be the "father of artificial intelligence" – Marvin Minsky.