The AI Future Is Here
AI’s integration into everything—untangling traffic snarls, dictating drug prescriptions, rewriting the rules of scientific discovery—is accelerating quickly
In January, Chinese artificial-intelligence start-up DeepSeek blew up the dam. The company released a chatbot that rivals industry leaders such as OpenAI’s Chat-GPT o1 and Anthropic’s Claude, and its code is open source and free—an intelligence untethered. No more gatekeeping by tech behemoths; now anyone with an idea and an Internet connection can summon machine intelligence to solve problems, write computer code or dream up something entirely new. The result? AI’s integration into everything—untangling traffic snarls, dictating drug prescriptions, rewriting the rules of scientific discovery—is likely to accelerate. For better or worse, AI is our future.
For better or worse, AI is our future.
Artificial intelligence is built to mimic our thought processes—new models can contain up to a trillion electrical connections that resemble neuronal synapses and run on circuitry engineered to work like the human brain. AI systems are trained on the entirety of the Internet—millions of websites, social media posts, reviews, recipes and forums. Those data, run through statistical algorithms, have helped large language models (LLMs) master human language. But LLMs are in no way capable of higher reasoning, memory, spatial perception, or myriad other skills. Those abilities are the basis of an as yet unachieved goal: artificial general intelligence.
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Because LLMs are programmed to train themselves behind the scenes, much of what goes on inside these models is a black box even to the people who create them. Chatbots are prone to inventing information out of thin air or giving downright dangerous medical advice. A field called explainable AI has emerged to help scientists uncover how chatbots “think.”
AI is quickly popping up in all facets of life. Several U.S. cities are experimenting with AI models to improve the flow of traffic. AI systems track users’ buying habits to set personalized product prices. Several models advise on financial investments, although their success rates…
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