It has been a long time since a software release has consumed the tech community as much as ChatGPT, the latest offering from OpenAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk.

This chatbot, trained on massive pools of data and now able to answer any query you might have, gained more than a million users in less than a week. Post after post on Twitter revealed the inanimate interface crafting eloquent, believable prose on whatever topic was asked of it. Economist Tyler Cowen even got it to write a passable poem in iambic pentameter about economist Thomas Schelling’s theory of deterrence for foreign policy.

ChatGPT is far from perfect. It struggles with facts from time to time, as Bloomberg journalist Joe Weisenthal discovered when he asked it to write his obituary. And The Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost rained on everyone’s parade by observing that the chatbot doesn’t “truly understand the complexity of human language,” ensuring that “any responses it generates are likely to be shallow and lacking in depth and insight.”

(by Michael J. Casey)