| Today’s Businessweek Daily is a special edition featuring stories from the June issue of the magazine, available online now. Editor Brad Stone is here with a preview. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. You can also subscribe to get the print edition. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022, people could instantly see that the field of artificial intelligence had dramatically advanced. We all speak a language, after all, and could appreciate how the chatbot answered questions in a fluid, close-to-human style. AI has made immense strides since then, but many of us are—and let me put this delicately—too unsophisticated to notice. Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says our limited ability to gather specialized knowledge makes it much harder for us to recognize the disconcerting pace of improvements in technology. Most people aren’t high-level mathematicians and may not know that, just in the past few years, AI’s mastery has progressed from high-school-level algebra to ninja-level calculus. Similarly, there are relatively few musical virtuosos in the world, but AI has recently become adept at reading sheet music, understanding musical theory, even creating new music in major genres. “What a lot of people are underestimating is just how much has happened in a very short amount of time,” Tegmark says. “Things are going very fast now.” The June issue of Bloomberg Businessweek is all about this accelerating pace of change—and its tremendous potential to scramble the balance of power between countries and companies, and to change how we work and live. In our cover story, we chronicle the emergence of DeepSeek and its talented, enigmatic CEO, Liang Wenfeng. When the Chinese AI startup released its R1 model in January, analysts marveled at the quality of a product from a company that had raised far less capital than its US rivals and was supposedly using data centers with less powerful Nvidia Corp. chips. US companies are committed to making sure the West doesn’t surrender its lead. Anthropic is trying to win the AI race without losing its soul, while OpenAI, in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, is building the first of its ambitious Stargate data centers. AI has also altered the trajectories of tech giants Apple and Microsoft, and its CEOs, Tim Cook and Satya Nadella, are grappling with a series of unexpected challenges and opportunities. Meanwhile, AI-generated content is becoming so pervasive online that it could soon sap the web of any practical utility, and the Pentagon is using machine learning to hasten humanity’s possible contact with alien life. Let’s hope they like us. We also grapple with the possibility that AI can create widespread economic damage and job losses—and we select our annual Ones to Watch: the promising up-and-comers in the technology field, whose names you may not know but should. If all of this is a bit unsettling, Tegmark finds solace in his belief that a human instinct for self-preservation will ultimately kick in: Pro-AI business leaders and politicians “don’t want someone to build an AI that will overthrow the government any more than they want plutonium to be legalized.” He remains concerned, though, that the inexorable acceleration of AI development is occurring just outside the visible spectrum of most people on Earth, and that it could have economic and societal consequences beyond our current imagination. “It sounds like sci-fi,” Tegmark says, “but I remind you that ChatGPT also sounded like sci-fi as recently as a few years ago.” |
