The Yale Review | What Was AI? A Folio on Life in the Age of LLMs
The Yale Review | What Was AI? A Folio on Life in the Age of LLMs
https://yalereview.org/folio-what-was-ai
Publish Date: 2026-06-08 06:02:00
Source Domain: yalereview.org
the title of this folio on artificial intelligence—“What Was AI?”—is offered in the past tense because the answer to that question will likely have changed by the time you read this issue. Quarterly magazines plan far in advance; AI does not wait on us. Progress that once seemed far away is already old news. The adoption of AI—and the political, social, and cultural changes that come with it—is only accelerating, moving faster than a writer who needs time to think can keep up with. The results are dizzying to contemplate. This folio, then, is a record of a moment that will surely be gone almost as soon as we have begun to name it.
ChatGPT launched in late 2022, five years after the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer—the computer architecture that undergirds today’s “neural networks”—and within two months it had one hundred million users. By February 2026, OpenAI reported that ChatGPT had nine hundred million weekly users—more than the combined populations of the United States, the European Union, and Canada.
When we say “artificial intelligence,” we usually mean “large language models,” or LLMs—a distinction one barely has to make anymore. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—they are everywhere among us, helpful and fast, expansive and dulling. The agents have arrived too, tools that, given a task, can head off and work with other AIs, if they choose, or teach themselves to use Microsoft Word, populate a Google Calendar, draft code. And beyond these, we now live amid many kinds of generative AI software, including small language models, Meta’s “large concept models,” multimodal systems that can read images, and more.
The impact of all of this will be—and, in some cases, already has been—staggering. One recent study predicts that by 2030, 6.1 percent of workers will be displaced. A “silent shift” is said to be underway: some companies are not replacing people who leave, instead routing work to…
