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Will AI progress create utopia, apocalypse, or somewhere in between? If you ask AI’s biggest boosters and investors, they’ll tell you that the steady drumbeat of AI advancement will lead to the eradication of disease, the mitigation of climate change, and a renaissance of both productivity and art. Talk to AI doomers, and they’ll warn you about catastrophic risk, mass economic displacement, and the internet becoming a toxic sea of disinformation and deepfakes. Still others believe that AI is wildly overhyped — a bubble on the brink of bursting, which might take the U.S. economy down with it.

Our job, as TIME’s technology correspondents, is to find the truth amidst those massive proclamations: to provide in-depth reporting and sharp analysis on the short-term and long-term impacts of AI. We’ve been doing this work separately and together for several years now, including in our jointly-written February 2023 cover story, “The AI Arms Race is Changing Everything,” which provided a prescient look at how corporate pressures were shaping the development of an ever-powerful technology. 

In the last three years, we’ve also taken you inside some of the most urgent issues on the cusp of the future. Billy was the first to reveal OpenAI’s use of low-paid Kenyan workers to detoxify ChatGPT. Andrew has covered the disproportionate impact that data centers have exerted on local communities. Between us we’ve interviewed some of the biggest names in the field, from Sam Altman to Vitalik Buterin.

Now, we bring you In the Loop, a newsletter which will provide you with insight and analysis  into the biggest AI storylines of the week. We’ll send you a rundown on what and who to know in AI, as well as how our sources are using AI and what we’re reading. Think of it as a digestible cheat sheet for an ever-changing and intensifying industry.