Big players, including Microsoft, with its Bing AI (and Copilot), Google, with Bard, and OpenAI, with ChatGPT-4, are making AI chatbot technology previously restricted to test labs more accessible to the general public.

We’ve even tested all three chatbots head to head to see which one is the best, or at least which one gives us the best responses right now when it comes to pressing questions like “How do I install RAM into my PC?”

How do these Large Language Model (LLM) programs work? OpenAI’s GPT-3 told us that AI uses “a series of autocomplete-like programs to learn language” and that these programs analyze “the statistical properties of the language” to “make educated guesses based on the words you’ve typed previously.” 

Or, in the words of James Vincent, a human person, “These AI tools are vast autocomplete systems, trained to predict which word follows the next in any given sentence. As such, they have no hard-coded database of ‘facts’ to draw on — just the ability to write plausible-sounding statements. This means they have a tendency to present false information as truth since whether a given sentence sounds plausible does not guarantee its factuality.”

But there are so many more pieces to the AI landscape that are coming into play — and there are going to be problems — but you can be sure to see it all unfold here on The Verge.