AI will be so important in the next decade that we shouldn't leave it to Google, Facebook or Microsoft to determine our future.

Currently, the face of AI is sullen chatbots and bad fantasy art, but it’s also becoming the new fabric of computing, from voice assistants to healthcare to pretty much everything announced at Apple’s 2023 WWDC keynote last week. AI is trained on large language models (LLMs). Generating LLMs is extremely expensive (around $100 million per run), putting it in the realm of large corporations and governments. And while some governments are already in the game, the US is still far behind.

“AI is going to be incredibly transformative over the next decade. It already is. These tools are going to evolve at an unimaginable pace, and it’s up to us whether we deny it and ignore it, or whether we embrace it and do what we can to make sure its evolution is as safe and useful as possible,” Star Kashman, who studies cybersecurity law, told Lifewire via email. “[I]t’s dangerous to put the development of AI solely in the hands of tech giants with ulterior motives.”

AI works like this: Very powerful computers crunch mind-boggling amounts of data and infer relationships in that data. For example, it might read a lot of text to learn which words are most likely to follow other words in specific circumstances. Then it creates a much smaller “instruction manual” (still several gigabytes) that can be used to, say, create a human-hating chatbot.