On 14 March 2023, OpenAI, a company based in San Francisco and in which Microsoft has a major investment, released an AI system called GPT-4. On 22 March, a report by a distinguished group of researchers at Microsoft, including two members of the US National Academies, claimed that GPT-4 exhibits “sparks of artificial general intelligence”. (Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a keyword for AI systems that match or exceed human capabilities across the full range of tasks to which the human mind is applicable.) On 29 March, the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit headed by the MIT physics professor Max Tegmark, released an open letter asking for a pause on “giant AI experiments”. It has been signed by well-known figures such as Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, and the Turing award-winner Yoshua Bengio, as well as hundreds of prominent AI researchers. The ensuing media hurricane continues.