AI is the future

“art,” with Midjourney user Jason Allen winning the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition with an AI-generated work, and online art communities banning AI-use outright.

All this makes it sound like AI is a fairly recent development, but that’s not true.

We’ve had a couple of other interesting AI experiments in the past.

For instance, Deepmind’s AlphaGo AI played the traditional game of Go, which has cennovemdecillion (10360) possible moves, as compared to Chess’ novemtrigintillion (10123.). AlphaGo made headlines when it beat arguably the world’s best Go player Lee Sedol 1-4 in a best of five match, a defeat that pushed Lee into retirement.

Since last December, I don’t think I’ve gone a single day without hearing someone talk about artificial intelligence.

Much like how Google and Band-Aid became part of our everyday vocabulary, my friends’ immediate reaction to a difficult problem in a class’ problem set has become, “just ChatGPT it.”

For a program that launched just three months ago, that’s impressive.

It took Google years to become popular enough that people were telling each other to go “Google” something.

It’s no wonder the platform’s already entered our vernacular, considering what it’s already achieved. I’m sure you’ve heard the numbers — ChatGPT broke records for fastest-growing consumer application, with 100 million active users just two months after launch.

It’s not just ChatGPT. Development of AI in visual-creative applications has also boomed in recent years.

Products like Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, among others, have caused huge debates about what can qualify as

There have also been major breakthroughs with Microsoft’s own machine-learning chatbot, Tay, which made headlines when Twitter denizens turned it into a misogynistic and racist neo-Nazi.

Still, nothing from the past has quite made waves like 2022 and 2023’s deluge of new AI tools.

Ostensibly absent from the news, is augmented and virtual reality — which may play a big role in our futures.

It’s abundantly clear that an AR/VR future is at least a decade away. The world’s leading VR minds haven’t even been able to fix the motion sickness issue yet, let alone make a mass-marketable product.

AI tools like ChatGPT are something that can be developed behind closed doors without the need for first-adopters willing to shell out thousands of dollars for hardware that will eventually become obsolete like with VR.

Programmers can spend a couple years building and honing their machine-learning AI models, testing internally or with “research previews,” and get a functioning product right into the hands of consumers with little to no hitches. OpenAI worked on development of the AI model behind ChatGPT since 2018, only releasing a preview in 2022 to widespread acclaim.

Already, catching Google sleeping at the wheel, Microsoft has struck a deal with OpenAI to put ChatGPT functionality into the Bing search engine for users to have a more conversational experience while browsing the internet.

AI has been slowly growing in popularity in recent years. Your phone uses artificial intelligence to figure out when it should lower its screen’s brightness. Your AirPods tell you and can automatically lower the volume of your music if it’s too loud. Your computer decides how sunlight should look in your 3D games. It is AI technology that