Depending on who you are what you are, what sorts of news and other content you engage with,

and what kind of work you do.

Artificial intelligence might be just a whisper on the horizon,

periodically murmured about by your kids or techie niece,

maybe a friend who's really into computer things,

or it might have taken over your news feed, your newsletter list, even your hobbies.

AI has been around for decades in its modern form,

but recent leaps in the capabilities wielded by LLM, large language model-based permutations of

this software, which were already on display in impressive but not mainstream ways over the past

few years, really landed in the common consciousness and news cycle

beginning at the very end of 2022.

When a company called OpenAI released a chat bot called ChatGPT, that blew everyone's collective

mind for the next several weeks and a regular pitter-patter of new developments based on that

model and similar

technologies that were already in development and at various stages of use within other tech

companies started landing soon after.

Basically, no one working in this space wanted to be seen as a laggard, and open AI in releasing

a not quite ready but still very impressive chatbot,

which could do all sorts of nifty things that other previous products were not able to do

as convincingly forced everyone's hand. And the public response to that still uncanny valley,

but less so, more useful, more realistic output-making software showed entities like Google, which invented

the LLM architecture most of these new tools are based on.

...