From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bolarro.

This is the Daily.

Today. Today, a Times investigation shows how as the country's biggest technology companies

race to build powerful new artificial intelligence systems,

they bent and broke the rules from the start.

My colleague, Cade Metzz on what he uncovered. It's Tuesday, April 16th. Kate, when we think about all the artificial intelligence products released over the past couple of years,

including of course these chat bots we've talked a lot about on

the show we so frequently talk about their future their future capabilities

their influence on society jobs jobs, our lives, but you recently decided to go back in time

to AI's past, to its origins, to understand the decisions that were made basically at the birth of this technology.

So why did you decide to do that?

Because if you're thinking about the future of these chatbots, that is defined by their past.

The thing you have to realize is that these chatbots learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital data.

So what my colleagues and I wanted to do with our investigation was really focus on that effort to gather more data.

We wanted to look at the type of data these companies were collecting, how they were gathering it, and how they were feeding it into their systems.

And when you all undertake this line of reporting, what do you end up finding?

We found that three major players in this race, Open AI, Google, and Meta, as they were locked

into this competition to develop better and better artificial intelligence,

they were willing to do almost anything to get their hands on this data, including ignoring and in some cases violating

corporate rules and waiting into a legal gray area as they gathered this data.

Basically cutting corners.

Cutting corners left and right.

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