The race of the AI labs heats up

Every so often a technology captures the world’s imagination. The latest example, judging by the chatter in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, in corner offices, newsrooms and classrooms around the world, is ChatGPT. In five days after its unveiling in November the artificially intelligent chatbot, created by a startup called OpenAI, drew 1m users, making it one of the fastest consumer-product launches in history. Microsoft, which has just invested $10bn in OpenAI, wants ChatGPT-like powers, which include generating text, images and video that seem like they could have been created by humans, to infuse much of the software it sells. On January 26th Google published a paper describing a similar model that can create music from a text description of a song. Investors in Alphabet, its parent company, are listening out for its answer to ChatGPT. Baidu, a Chinese search giant, reportedly plans to add a chatbot to its search engine in March.