"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," Arthur C Clarke famously said. And this could certainly be said of the impressive OpenAI update to ChatGPT, called GPT-4o, which was released on Monday. With the slight caveat that it felt a lot like the magician was a horny 12-year-old boy who had just watched the Spike Jonze movie Her. If you aren't up to speed on GPT-4o (the o stands for "omni") it's basically an all-singing, all-dancing, all-seeing version of the original chatbot. It can give you advice, it can rate your jokes, it can describe your surroundings, it can banter with you.

The real threat is much more obvious and interesting. We've all heard the prophetic apocalyptic predictions for AI's future. Elon Musk has said that it's our "biggest existential threat" and has likened it to "summoning the demon." Other great minds are similarly vocal about their fears. The late Stephen Hawking said that AI could wipe out human race.

Ever wonder why Alexa is not Alex, which could actually be a nickname for either gender? It's actually ironic that a company with a name derived from a fierce warrior race of women just fell into the standard practice of casting the helper who takes orders from the user as female. In fact, the AI agent's name is derived from Alexandria, a city whose claim to fame in the ancient world was its library, according to Daniel Rausch, the head of Amazon's "Smart Home" division. He told Business Insider that it is to capture the idea of the original collection of volumes that housed "all the collective knowledge of the world at that time." But they could have just as easily considered the fact that the city was named for Alexander the Great, and gone with the name Alex, a nickname adopted by men and women.