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WASHINGTON — How good would an algorithm have to be to take over your job? It’s a new question for many workers amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI programs that can hold conversations, write stories and even generate songs and images within seconds. For doctors who review scans to spot cancer and other diseases, however, AI has loomed for about a decade as more algorithms promise to improve accuracy, speed up work and, in some cases, take over entire parts of the job.

Ann Danielson is expecting a steady stream of visitors this summer to her alpaca ranch southeast of Longmont. The ranch is one of roughly 120 small businesses in Colorado that open up their property overnight to people camping in recreational vehicles in exchange for a little patronage. This will be the third summer that Danielson, co-owner of Annie’s Alpaca Ranch, has participated in the program by Harvest Hosts, a Colorado-based company that coordinates with businesses across the country, listing more than 5,000 sites as potential stopovers.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced last year that his company would release an artificial intelligence system, Jeffrey Emanuel had reservations. Emanuel, a part-time hacker and full-time AI enthusiast, had tinkered with “closed” AI models, including OpenAI’s, meaning the systems’ underlying code could not be accessed or modified. When Zuckerberg introduced Meta’s AI system by invitation only to a handful of academics, Emanuel was concerned that the technology would remain limited to just a small circle of people. But in a release last summer of an updated AI system, Zuckerberg made the code “open source” so that it could be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone. Emanuel, the founder of the blockchain startup Pastel Network, was sold.

After all, you are what you eat, and in a similar vein, you are how you search. If you have used Google lately and been lucky—or unlucky—enough to encounter an answer to your query rather than a bunch of links, you have been subjected to something called AI Overviews. This is a new core feature that Google has been rolling out, a move widely anticipated since the company’s experiments with its LaMDA large language model in 2021, and since OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot rocketed to prominence in 2023.

Enlarge / Fungus samples are seen on display inside the Fungarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, west London in 2023. The Fungarium was founded in 1879 and holds an estimated 380,000 specimens from the UK. (credit: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images) It’s hard to miss the headliners at Kew Gardens.

At a federal research lab located at 11,135 feet (3,397 meters) of elevation, U. S. scientists measured a consequential record. Due to its remoteness in the Pacific Ocean, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, located high up in Hawaii, is tasked with taking untainted, daily atmospheric measurements.