IT WAS hard to avoid artificial intelligence in 2023, with the vertiginous rise of chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs). By February, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing app of all time. By the year’s end, it had become an everything machine: browsing the internet, interpreting pictures, generating any requested image and inserting itself into many existing tools and services – and it wasn’t the only AI to do so.
“Where the technology is going next is clearly to be more multimodal,”…