Washington Post- free link]: “Artificial intelligence has become shockingly capable in the past year. The latest chatbots can conduct fluid conversations, craft poems, even write lines of computer code while the latest image-makers can create fake “photos” that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. It wasn’t always this way. As recently as two years ago, AI created robotic text riddled with errors. Images were tiny, pixelated and lacked artistic appeal. The mere suggestion that AI might one day rival human capability and talent drew ridicule from academics. A confluence of innovations has spurred growth. Breakthroughs in mathematical modeling, improvements in hardware and computing power, and the emergence of massive high-quality data sets have supercharged generative AI tools. While artificial intelligence is likely to improve even further, experts say the past two years have been uniquely fertile. Here’s how it all happened so fast…”