We have reached the peak of ChatGPT. Launched in December as a web app by San Francisco firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight.
By some estimates, it is the fastest-growing Internet service, reaching 100 million users just two months after launch. Through OpenAI’s $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the technology is now being incorporated into Office software and the Bing search engine. Snapped into action by its newly awakened rival in the search battle, Google is accelerating the launch of its own chatbot, LaMDA.
But OpenAI’s success didn’t come out of nowhere. The chatbot is the most polished iteration yet in a line of great language models that go back years. That’s how we got here.
—Will Douglas Heaven
The climate solution under your feet
Technologies designed to fight climate change are getting wilder these days. Hydrogen-powered airplanes, underwater mining robots and nuclear fusion reactors could each play a role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
But there are also less attractive pieces to solving climate change. Take building materials, for example: the world’s most widely used material, by mass, is cement, and it’s something of a climate nightmare. The good news is that a handful of companies are working hard to reverse cement’s climate impact. Read the whole story.
