In case you have been somewhere else in the solar system, here is a brief AI news update. My apologies if it sounds like the opening paragraph of a bad science fiction novel. On 14 March 2023, OpenAI, a company based in San Francisco and part owned by Microsoft, released an AI system called GPT-4. On 22 March, a report by a distinguished group of researchers at Microsoft, including two members of the US National Academies, claimed that GPT-4 exhibits "sparks of artificial general intelligence". On 29 March, the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit headed by the MIT physics professor Max Tegmark, released an open letter asking for a pause on "giant AI experiments". It has been signed by well-known figures such as Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak, and the Turing award-winner Yoshua Bengio, as well as hundreds of prominent AI researchers.