The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

When GPT-4 launched in March 2023, results were again impressive. As with its predecessors, you can ask GPT-4 to compose poetry in the style of Emily Dickinson and it obliges; ask it to pick up from a random snippet of The Lord of the Rings and you are suddenly reading a plausible imitation of Tolkien; request start-up business plans and the output is akin to having a roomful of executives on call. Moreover, it can ace standardized tests from the bar exam to the GRE. It can also work with images and code, create 3-D computer games that run in desktop browsers, build smartphone apps, debug your code, identify weaknesses in contracts, and suggest compounds for novel drugs, even offering ways of modifying them so they are not patented. It will produce websites from hand-drawn images and understand the subtle human dynamics in complex scenes; show it a fridge and it will come up with recipes based on what’s in it; write a rough presentation and it will polish and design a professional-looking version. It appears to “understand” spatial and causal reasoning, medicine, law, and human psychology. Within days of its release people had built tools that automated lawsuits, helped co-parent children, and offered real-time fashion advice. Within weeks they’d created add-ons so that GPT-4 could accomplish complex tasks like creating mobile apps or researching and writing detailed market reports. All of this is just the start. We are only beginning to scratch at the profound impact larg...

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