The scrappy underdog AI firm OpenAI has stirred the sleeping tech giants with its generative AI products, most recently and most prominently the conversational chatbot ChatGPT. Microsoft spent $10 billion on a partnership with OpenAI in an attempt to leap-frog its younger big tech competitors by weaving AI into many products; Google internally declared a "code red" and is cutting red tape to put out AI products more quickly, including a direct competitor to ChatGPT that was just announced; meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg has declared his intent to make Meta a "leader in generative AI," clearly a reaction to the attention OpenAI is garnering. The products these companies are suddenly striving for sound similar, but who will be the winner? Although much discussion has centered around the size of the AI models and how much data they are trained on, there's another factor that may matter a lot, too: the degree to which the contenders build trustworthy systems that don't unduly harm society and further destabilize democracy. OpenAI's earlier text generation product GPT-3 grabbed a lot of attention but never saw the widespread consumer adoption that ChatGPT has attained.

But the debates between Facebook and the White House throughout the spring and into summer also gave rise to a broader and still unresolved disagreement over what constitutes misinformation, according to the person familiar with Facebook's thinking. Facebook strongly believes people should have the right to broadly express themselves without censorship on social platforms, and had reviewed research that shows that friends and family can often be more effective at countering misinformation than official sources that people distrust. The Facebook executives thought the Biden camp was going too far, by identifying specific pieces of content as problematic and asking it to potentially suppress valuable conversations where people express fears and skepticism.