It takes a lot to frighten Zee. The 35-year-old father of two rarely gets flustered: not when he first set out on the 4,000-mile journey from his family home in Pakistan to the UK more than a decade ago; not during the years he spent struggling for survival on the fringes of Britain's formal economy; not when the Home Office threatened to deport him, plunging his young family into uncertainty. But the cold, foggy, final hours of 24 January this year – they felt different. "My heart was pounding," Zee remembers. That was the night Zee and his colleagues at Amazon's BHX4 warehouse in Coventry decided to make history, abandoning their workstations and launching an unprecedented stoppage to demand higher wages. They had walked out before, in a spontaneous, ad hoc protest. But this was different: a carefully planned and legal effort, the likes of which Amazon UK had never faced. Standing in their way at the exit gates was a line of senior managers who had the power to make or break each worker's future, staring down anyone who might dare to pass. "As midnight struck, I kept catching other people's eyes: do we go, or do we stay?" Zee recalls. "We didn't know what would happen if we crossed that threshold. But we did know that somebody, somewhere had to be the first to try."

To get the inside story behind the chatbot--how it was made, how OpenAI has been updating it since release, and how its makers feel about its success--I talked to four people who helped build what has become one of the most popular internet apps ever. In addition to Agarwal and Fedus, I spoke to John Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI, and Jan Leike, the leader of OpenAI's alignment team, which works on the problem of making AI do what its users want it to do (and nothing more). What I came away with was the sense that OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview, but has grabbed the opportunity to push this technology forward, watching how millions of people are using it and trying to fix the worst problems as they come up. Since November, OpenAI has already updated ChatGPT several times. The researchers are using a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking).

When you try to describe the much-loved video game Lemmings, it sounds like a wind-up. It looked, if not bad, then wilfully basic even for 1991. But, released years before mobile phone games were a thing, it was nonetheless a fiendishly addictive game that feels like the spiritual precursor to the likes of Angry Birds. And it was manna to many, many kids like me, whose sole household computing device was a rubbish PC with a horrible four-colour CGA screen that basically couldn't play any video game of the time … except Lemmings! To mark 30 years since its release, Exient – current holders of the franchise – has made a YouTube documentary about it.

When Chih-Han Yu's work on multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) was nominated as the best doctoral thesis of the year in 2010, the rising star in AI was not content with his stellar achievements, which included an early prototype self-driving car that laid the foundation for Google's self-driving car project. "People knew we were publishing high-quality research, but back in my dorm, my room-mate and I were thinking that we've worked on all this coding, but we have never seen any algorithm that has really impacted the world and transformed how people live and how business is done," said Yu, referring to his time at Harvard University. The duo decided they should do something and started a company specialising in AI-powered game engines that mimic the actions of human gamers, based on Yu's doctoral thesis. But that proved to be a mistake, said Yu, because there was no demand for the technology at the time. Two years later, they pivoted the business that would later become Appier, a supplier of AI-based marketing technology that helps businesses improve customer engagement and drive sales at a time when interest in big data was growing.

In recent years, StarCraft, considered to be one of the most challenging Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games and one of the longest-played esports of all time, has emerged by consensus as a "grand challenge" for AI research. Our StarCraft II program AlphaStar is the first Artificial Intelligence to defeat a top professional player. In a series of test matches held on 19 December 2018, AlphaStar decisively beat Team Liquid's Grzegorz "MaNa" Komincz, one of the world's strongest professional StarCraft players, 5-0, following a successful benchmark match against his team-mate Dario "TLO" Wünsch. The matches took place under professional match conditions on a competitive ladder map and without any game restrictions.

Alex Krizhevsky didn't get into the AI business to change the course of history. Krizhevsky, born in Ukraine but raised in Canada, was just looking to delay getting a coding job when he reached out to Geoff Hinton about doing a computer-science PhD program in AI at the University of Toronto. The fateful moment was when, as a graduate student, Krizhevsky and a fellow student named Ilya Sutskever, decided to enter the ImageNet competition, a test for AI consisting of a huge database of online images. The competition, open to anyone in the world, was to evaluate algorithms designed for large-scale object detection and image classification. The point wasn't just to crown a winner, but to test a hypothesis: with the right algorithm, the massive amount data in the ImageNet database could be the key to unlocking AI's potential.

In February Olajide KSI Olatunji, a British YouTuber with more than 18.5 million followers managed to attract more viewers to a white collar boxing match between two amateur fighters than watched the FA Cup final. Now, a date and location for the sequel to that fight, due to be contested by two of online video's biggest stars has been released – though the future of the fight itself is in jeopardy. Twenty four-year-old KSI has been engaged in a war of words with Logan Paul, the 22-year-old YouTuber famous for uploading a video of a suicide victim to YouTube, triggering a temporary ban from making money on the site, since calling out the American after defeating Joe Weller, another YouTuber, in front of a sold-out crowd at the Copper Box Arena back in February. In tweets sent overnight on Thursday between the two YouTubers, who have more than 35 million subscribers between them, the pair revealed key details about their mooted meeting. The bout, due to be the first of two between the YouTubers, has been pencilled in for 25 August, a bank holiday weekend.

Google is planning to bring artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to the diminutive Raspberry Pi this year. "Google is going to arrive in style in 2017. The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community," said The Raspberry Pi Foundation. 'We thought we'd sell 1,000': The inside story of the Raspberry Pi The $35 Linux Raspberry Pi computer has sparked a coding revolution. "Google's range of AI and machine learning technology could enable makers to build even more powerful projects," it said.

"AI is about to change our world profoundly. This book tells you everything you need to know." (Leander Kahney, author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products) "If you're interested in learning more about our robotic soon-to-be overlords, your best bet is THINKING MACHINES" (The Spectator) "makes a convincing, often disturbing, but always-entertaining case that that we're in for a wild ride." Tech billionaires, reclusive scientists, dancing vacuum cleaners, voices beyond the grave – how a dream from the 1950s became our modern, super-networked world.

The historic match demonstrated the growing power of artificial intelligence and helped connect the ancient game with a mainstream audience. Go is loved and studied by computer scientists, business leaders, and politicians because the game balances elegance with complexity. Diabetics have been waiting for years for better technology to manage their condition. Some got tired of waiting and hacked together an open source hardware and software solution. Much of Go's appeal is in the game's' ability to provoke thought that inspires and guides action outside the game.