Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. As we look back at VentureBeat's top AI stories of the year, it's clear that the industry's advances -- including, notably, in generative AI -- are vast and powerful, but only the beginning of what is to come. For example, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab behind AI tools that exploded this year, including DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, debuted buzzed-about advancements that drew attention from the general public as well as the tech industry. DALL-E's text-to-image generation and ChatGPT's new capabilities to produce high-quality, long-form content made creatives question whether they will soon be out of a job -- and who owns the content these tools are creating anyway? Meanwhile, the next iteration of advancements may not be far off for OpenAI.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. Tomorrow morning, I head south. Straight down I-95, from central New Jersey to northeast Florida, where I will be setting up my laptop in St. Augustine for the next two months. It's about as far from Silicon Valley as I can be in the continental U.S., but that's where you'll find me gearing up for the first artificial intelligence (AI) news of 2023. These are the 5 biggest AI stories I'm waiting for: ChatGPT is so 2022, don't you think? The hype around OpenAI's chatbot "research preview," released on November 30, has barely peaked, but the noisy speculation around what's coming next -- GPT-4 -- is like the sound of millions of Swifties waiting for Taylor's next album to drop.

In the sci-fi film Ex Machina, reclusive inventor Nathan Bateman foresees a bleak future, telling the movie's protagonist Caleb that, "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa." When we don't understand something, we tend to fear it; which is one reason popular movies like Ex Machina and HBO's nail-biting new series Westworld like to imagine futures in which artificial intelligence plots to destroy humanity. Fortunately, AI is far more likely to recommend those titles to your Netflix queue than to result in a dystopian society out of a George Orwell novel. While technologies including Amazon's Alexa have been busy making people's lives outside of the workplace easier, bots were the big office story in 2016, helping companies handle routine tasks such as managing support tickets and streamlining workflows. In the coming years, machine learning will take on more of the non-routine work as well, ushering in the new era of artificial intelligence--one that looks to be far brighter than the future Hollywood typically envisions.