In the wee hours of an August morning, an artificial-intelligence project manager at Google loaded the newest creation from its DeepMind lab onto a platform that ranks AI models. PREMIUM Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the company’s annual developer conference in May. Google had fallen behind in the AI race, while its rival OpenAI had attracted hundreds of millions of users to its ChatGPT chatbot. Google researchers were hoping that a new feature—a lightning-fast image generator—would give the search titan an edge in a weak spot for ChatGPT. Naina Raisinghani, known inside Google for working late into the night, needed a name for the new tool to complete the upload. It was 2:30 a.m., though, and...
