The race of the AI labs heats up

Every so often a technology captures the world’s imagination. The latest example, judging by the chatter in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, in corner offices, newsrooms and classrooms around the world, is ChatGPT. In five days after its unveiling in November the artificially intelligent chatbot, created by a startup called OpenAI, drew 1m users, making it one of the fastest consumer-product launches in history. Microsoft, which has just…