Introduction: Moments of Enlightenment Even with GPT-4 on board, though, I still had reservations. Because, really, an AI book? When things are moving so quickly? Even with a helpful AI on hand to speed the process, any such book would be obsolete before we started to write it— that’s how fast the industry is moving. So I hemmed and hawed for a bit. And then I thought of a frame that pushed me into action. This didn’t have to be a comprehensive “book” book so much as a travelog, an informal exercise in exploration and discovery, me (with GPT-4) choosing one path among many. A snapshot memorializing—in a subjective and decidedly not definitive way—the AI future we were about to experience. What would we see? What would impress us most? What would we learn about ourselves in the process? Well aware of the brief half-life of this travelog’s relevance, I decided to press ahead. A month later, at the end of November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a “conversational agent,” aka chatbot, a modified version of GPT-3.5 that they had fine-tuned through a process called Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback (RLHF) to enable more flowing, human-like conversations with its human users. Five days later, ChatGPT had more than a million registered users. 1 In late January 2023, Microsoft —which had invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019—announced that it would be investing $10 billion more in the company. It soon unveiled a new version of its search engine Bing, with a variation of ChatGPT built into it. 1 I sit on Microsoft’s Board of Directors. 9