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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, December the 27th. I'm James Rundle for the Wall Street Journal.

We're hearing from our reporters and columnists about some of the biggest companies, trends and people in tech, and what could be in store for 2025.

Coming up on today's show, artificial intelligence is everywhere, propelled by the runaway success of OpenAI's chat GPT and other models.

But the tech behind generative AI is far more than just the engine for a fancy chat bomb.

Researchers are exploring how the technology might be used to create bacteria that eats plastic,

self-driving cars,

or potential cures for cancer.

Our tech columnist Christopher Mims joins us to talk about how the bleeding edge of AI research may go mainstream next year.

Christopher, many people have become familiar with AI as essentially a conversational search tool in recent

months thanks to chat GPT and other platforms.

However, the underlying technology has greater applications.

Tell us about the transformer and why it's so important.

So in 2017, some researchers at Google DeepMind, which is their AI outfit, published a paper called

Attention is All You Need. And that started this supernova explosion of AI that we've seen since.

And what was key about that paper was introduced a suite of algorithms which give us a new

model for how to create in a computer a universal learner, something which can extract from

any large body of data that has inherent structure in it, like language, the sort of underlying

order of that data.

And it's the reason that we have chat GPT, for example.

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