Inside KI

Welcome to the future, which has just begun. The year 2023 was a turning point: the year artificial intelligence began to write and speak like a human. The year we suddenly couldn't be sure whether a news story, a photograph or a pop song was made by people or generated by AI. The year programmers, lawyers and filmmakers debated what they could still do better than AI. That is only the beginning. In 2024, 2025 and beyond, the technology will reach its full effect.

The centre of this development is, once again, Silicon Valley. OpenAI, the start-up that built ChatGPT, is based there. Microsoft alone has invested 13 billion dollars in the young company. CEO Satya Nadella is integrating OpenAI's tech across all of Microsoft's products. But the race for AI supremacy has only just begun. China wants to position itself as a superpower here, too – and Europe must not be steamrolled by the tech giants.

We live in exhilarating times. This book is meant as a guide. I wrote it together with my colleague Larissa Holzki, who leads an artificial intelligence team out of Handelsblatt's Düsseldorf headquarters. We take you with us. Whether in Silicon Valley, Europe or China, we open the doors to the places where our future with this technology is being shaped: the research labs in San Francisco, the start-up Aleph Alpha in Heidelberg, Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond near Seattle. Anyone who understands what drives the people there and what they are building can form their own picture of how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the coming years and decades.