The New Yorker – [“At the end of every section in this article, you can read the text that an artificial intelligence predicted would come next.”] “…But Smart Compose goes well beyond spell-checking. It isn’t correcting words I’ve already formed in my head; it’s coming up with them for me, by harnessing the predictive power of deep learning, a subset of machine learning. Machine learning is the sophisticated method of computing probabilities in large data sets, and it underlies virtually all the extraordinary A.I. advances of recent years, including those in navigation, image recognition, search, game playing, and autonomous vehicles. In this case, it’s making billions of lightning-fast probability calculations about word patterns from a year’s worth of e-mails sent from Gmail.com. (It does not include e-mails sent by G Suite customers.)

“…In February, OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence company, announced that the release of the full version of its A.I. writer, called GPT-2—a kind of supercharged version of Smart Compose—would be delayed, because the machine was too good at writing. The announcement struck critics as a grandiose publicity stunt (on Twitter, the insults flew), but it was in keeping with the company’s somewhat paradoxical mission, which is both to advance research in artificial intelligence as rapidly as possible and to prepare for the potential threat posed by superintelligent machines that haven’t been taught to “love humanity,” as Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, put it to me…”