Big Tech needed a win. If you’re going to understand artificial intelligence in 2023—and you should know up front that you aren’t going to understand it (no one understands it, including the people whose job it is to build and explain it; but let’s say you want to try)—here is your crucial piece of background information. Tech was on a losing streak. It is absurd to say that an industry is on a losing streak when the leaders of that industry are constantly in the news for building atmospherically regulated undersea bunkers where they can stroll through their kelp gardens sipping immortality serums after civilization collapses. Still. At the end of 2022, the metaverse was a bust. Cryptocurrency had been exposed as a kind of weird dating app designed to match the worst people in the world with the most gullible. (Often, these were the same people.) Tech needed its next new thing, and it needed it quick.
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