One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.

This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that’s only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers. Stripping out a gas engine, transmission, and 100-plus moving parts turns a vehicle into something more digital than analog—sort of like how typing on an iPhone keyboard is different than on my clackety old Samsung flip phone. “It’s the software that is really the heart of an EV,” DeGraff said—it runs the motors, calculates how many miles are left on a charge, optimizes the brakes, and much more.

Just like with other gadgets that bug you about software updates, all of this firmware can be updated over Wi-Fi while a car charges overnight. Rivian has updated its software to add a “Sand Mode” that can enhance its cars’ driving ability on dusty terrain. Many new cars are getting stuffed with technology—a new gas-powered Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with TikTok integration and a selfie stick—but EVs are capable of more significant updates. A gas car is never going to meaningfully get more miles per gallon, but one such update from Tesla in 2020 increased the range on its Model X car from 328 to 351 miles after the company found ways to wring more efficiency out of its internal parts. And because EVs all drive basically the same, tech is a bigger part of the sell. Instead of idly passing the time while an EV recharges, you can now use a car’s infotainment system to Zoom into a meeting, play Grand Theft Auto, and stream Amazon Prime.

The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars—no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks. There are new problems to contend with too: In Tesla’s case, its “Autopilot” software has been implicated in fatal crashes. (It was the subject of a massive recall earlier this month that required an over-the-air update.) You now might scroll on your phone in bed, commute in your EV, and log into your work laptop, all of which are powered by processors that are constantly bugging you to update them.

[Read: The end of manual transmission]

If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that’s roughly what’s going on here. “The transition to EVs is completely changing everything,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “It’s changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It’s changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that.”

Take the batteries. To manufacture battery cells powerful enough for a car is so phenomenally expensive and arduous that Toyota is pumping nearly $14 billion into a single battery plant in North Carolina. To create software-enabled cars, you need software engineers, and car companies cannot get enough of them. (Perhaps no other industry has benefited the most from Silicon Valley’s year of layoffs.) At the very low end, estimates Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at Guidehouse Insights, upwards of 10,000 “software engineers, interface designers, networking engineers, data center experts and silicon engineers have been hired by automakers and suppliers in recent years.” The tech wars can sometimes verge on farce: One former Apple executive runs Ford’s customer-software team, while another runs GM’s.

At every level, the auto industry is facing the type of headache-inducing questions about job losses and employment that still feels many years away with AI. “There’s a new skill set we’re going to need, and I don’t think I can teach everyone—it will take too much time,” Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said in May. “So there is going to be disruption in this transition.” Job cuts are already happening, and more may come—even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

But if EVs are having an “iPhone moment,” we are still in the days when a few early adopters had the clunky, OG version. Most cars you see are a decade old; for all these EV sales, just 1 percent of cars on the road are all-electric. Even if we hit President Joe Biden’s EV target of 50 percent of sales by 2030, the sheer life span of cars will mean that gas vehicles will still greatly outnumber electric ones by then. Gas stations are not closing. Parking garages are not buckling under the weight of EVs and their hefty batteries. Electric cars remain too expensive, and they are limited by janky public chargers that are too slow, assuming they work at all. If you don’t have a house where you can install your own plug, EVs are still mostly just unrealistic. Most alarming might be the politics that surround them: Donald Trump and lots of other Republicans are vowing to stymie their growth. Carmakers are not even hiding that next year’s election might lead them to reconsider their EV plans.

Even so, the transition is not slowing down. Next year, America should hit 1.9 million EV sales, Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Another burst of models is coming: A retro-futuristic Volkswagen van! A Cadillac Escalade with a 55-inch touchscreen! A tiny Fiat 500e for just $30,000! And yes, they are succumbing a bit to hype themselves. In June, Mercedes’s infotainment screen got an optional update. Now you can talk to it through a chatbot.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.

Apple is PETA’s 2023 darling. The animal rights group, known for controversial ads, named the iPhone maker its company of the year because it stopped using leather in accessories.

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After nearly seven months of rumors and delays, Google has finally released its most advanced generative-AI model to date: Gemini 1.0, a program the company is advertising as one of the most capable pieces of software ever. It can purportedly solve calculus problems, explain memes, write code, and—in a real example offered by the company—provide feedback on cooking photos to help you decide when your omelet is done. Google is even billing Gemini as “a first step toward a truly universal AI model,” one that is designed from the ground up to engage with images, video, text, audio, and computer code in a range of contexts. And, somehow, it all feels a bit underwhelming.

Perhaps that is because today’s announcement feels like any other Silicon Valley product launch. Gemini comes in three different versions—Nano, Pro, and Ultra—suited for tasks of increasing complexity, akin to an iPhone 15 Plus, Pro, and Pro Max. (Nano and Pro are available now, though Ultra won’t be out until early next year; for now, it’s a branding exercise.) At the highest end, Gemini can outperform OpenAI’s top model, GPT-4, on most metrics, but these are iterative advances—less like the invention of a smartphone and more like adding a few megapixels to its camera. Gemini’s launch provides the clearest sign yet that generative AI has reached its corporate phase.

[Read: Money will kill ChatGPT’s magic]

Gemini’s release comes exactly one month after Google’s top chatbot competitor, OpenAI, hosted its first developers’ conference—a day dedicated to showcasing new GPT-based products and kickstarting the associated revenue streams that looked an awful lot like Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference or Google’s similar I/O event. OpenAI’s DevDay helped precipitate an epic clash at the start-up’s San Francisco headquarters, in which the CEO Sam Altman was ousted, at least in part for commercializing the company’s technology too rapidly. He was reinstated five days later with the backing of OpenAI’s most powerful investors. The biggest of those backers, Microsoft, now has a nonvoting seat on OpenAI’s nonprofit board, adding the world’s second biggest company to an entity that had initially been structured to beat back corporate greed.

Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft aren’t alone in the corporate generative-AI race. On an earnings call earlier this year, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, explicitly said that improving AI translates to more engaging products and, in turn, more advertising dollars, and that so-called foundation models such as Gemini, or Meta’s own Llama, are creating “entirely new classes of products.” Late last month, Amazon released its own AI-powered assistant, Amazon Q, aimed at helping businesses, and a recent Amazon earnings report touted a “slew of generative AI releases” that would bolster the company’s profits. The AI boom turned the chipmaker Nvidia into a trillion-dollar company. Even Apple, late to the party, is reportedly spending millions of dollars a day to develop its most advanced AI models and is starting to release software frameworks that would allow developers to incorporate generative AI into apps. At the moment, generative AI is more about competition than revolution.

[Read: The future of AI is GOMA]

As Big Tech vies for the same pot of gold, AI products are becoming hard to distinguish. In a note accompanying Gemini’s release, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that generative AI will accelerate knowledge and productivity in ways “we haven’t seen before.” But we have heard claims that the latest smartphone, VR headset, or office software will do the same—again and again, for years. Google’s chatbot, Bard, which uses the Gemini Pro model as of today, has gone through three underlying generative-AI programs in the past year; OpenAI’s ChatGPT has also received a few software updates in the past year. Bard and ChatGPT learned to describe images; the rates at which they misled and hallucinated decreased; their prose got tighter and more direct. But the fundamental experience of trying to tease useful responses from a quasi-intelligent screen hasn’t changed, just as driving a car that gets better mileage isn’t appreciably new so much as a tad better.

These AI models have also started to provide gateways into whole ecosystems of other products, not dissimilar to the way that the iPhone has features that crossover with the MacBook. Bard can help you out in Gmail, Google Drive, and on YouTube, and GPT-powered AI assistants litter Microsoft’s own suite of cloud services. Nano is expressly designed to run on smartphones, and Google is incorporating it into its Pixel 8 Pro device. The entire Gemini suite is also optimized to run on custom-made computer chips that Google advertises as the best way to train AI. Microsoft has taken a similar approach with its own models and chips; every step of the AI pipeline involves a Big Tech product, whether for people using AI software or developers coding those programs on Big Tech’s data servers. The tech giants have much to gain from productizing generative AI and its spin-off software: It is one component of many that helps lock consumers into a company’s digital universe.

The profit motive, now more explicit than ever, may justify even more secrecy from these tech companies. Apple fought for years against laws that would help individuals open up and repair their gadgets, in part on the basis that valuable trade secrets would be revealed. Keeping a tight lid on AI—already an opaque technology—might be justified along the same lines.

Gemini supposedly received extensive evaluations for “factuality, child safety, harmful content, cybersecurity, biorisk, representation and inclusivity.” Yet the public knows very little about those checks, akin to how the harmful content-moderation and labor practices of earlier software and gadget giants were kept under wraps. (Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Gemini’s safety evaluations.) That inscrutability makes it hard to verify claims about AI’s capabilities, let alone to prevent the building of models that use, say, exploited labor or pirated material. It is a fair bet, then, that whether the generative-AI race prompts genuine societal transformation or simply provides a new profit model, its winners will be whichever tech companies best execute Silicon Valley’s decades-old playbook.

The Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular cookbooks in American history, entered kitchens in 1931 with a simple premise: Anyone can learn to make a meal. The Depression had disrupted the food supply, leaving a generation of new homemakers doubting their ability to furnish healthy, varied dishes from sparse pantries. The book’s popularity lay in author Irma Rombauer’s approachable, if I can do this, you can too tone, an attitude that would help change how everyday Americans made dinner.

Nearly a century later, another generation of young cooks has faced another global catastrophe, and emerged with their own relationship to cooking. While the coronavirus pandemic sent millions of Americans away from restaurants and into their kitchens, its culinary impact was formative for Gen Z, many of whom were in their teens or early 20s when it began. Whether stuck in their parents’ homes or on their own, these young people embraced cooking as an act of independence and, as one researcher told me, coping. On TikTok, cooking tutorials have hundreds of millions of views. Today, cooking has become a major generational avocation and source of pride.   

The pandemic fundamentally disrupted many young people’s day-to-day life—school, sports, spending time with friends—and, with it, the anchor of routine. For example, Mia Kristensen was 16 when her high-school classes shifted to Zoom. Around this time, she first downloaded TikTok. The bright vegetable bowls she saw her peers making—familiar to her as a vegan, but somehow finer, more inspiring—became aspirational. Cooking was something to look forward to during the day, she told me. Making dinner from scratch became an achievement.

TikTok certainly helped with cooking’s proliferation, as it dished out entertaining, accessible cooking tutorials by and for young people marooned at home. The medium met the moment, just as it had before: Irma Rombauer paved the way for Julia Child on television, J. Kenji López-Alt on YouTube, and now TikTok creators, whose pandemic-era videos helped convey that everyone was managing as best they could. People were in their own kitchens, yes, but displaying their handiwork in one global digital setting.

[Read: The best kind of food to cook during a pandemic]

There seems to be no sign of “kitchen fatigue” now, according to MaryLeigh Bliss, the chief content officer at YPulse, a marketing firm that researches Gen Z and Millennial habits. In fact, saving money is an additional motivation to keep cooking. As more and more Gen Zers enter the workforce, they face steep housing, goods, and education costs. According to one report, more than half of Gen Zers surveyed have an anxiety disorder, citing worry about the future as the top cause.

Indeed, researchers told me that knowing how to cook—even if it began as pandemic escapism or an economic consideration—has become a key identity marker for Gen Z. This generation tends to define itself through hobbies, many discovered online, like mastering a video game or knitting a scarf. Cooking as a pastime—like being a “foodie” before it—can signal a number of values, according to Kathy Sheehan, a senior vice president of Cassandra, a market-trends research firm. It might say someone is interested in different cultures, or prioritizes shopping for local, seasonal produce.

Zoomers are particularly concerned with building well-rounded lives, and cooking reflects this, Roberta Katz, a cultural anthropologist and the author of Gen Z, Explained, told me. Cooking is a creative act that can serve as a quiet interlude, largely free from technology. For young people who’ve spent nearly their whole lives with the internet and the iPhone, cooking’s tangibility can be stabilizing. “It grounds you in a world that’s in constant motion,” Katz told me.

That tactility was important to Celeste Mosley, 21, who told me she became depressed during the pandemic. After finding a rice-pudding recipe on TikTok, making it became, “the only thing that got me out of the bed half the time,” she said. Pour the rice. Slice the butter. Stir, stir, stir. The process became meditative for her. This isn’t a surprise: The process of cooking can improve one’s mood as well as one’s anxiety, according to Nicole Farmer, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center who studies behavior and nutrition. Following directions connects the task at hand with past experiences—I’ve strained tomatoes like this before, or This pasta is new, but I know how to use oregano. Cooking’s combination of new and familiar actions can boost the brain’s “effortless attention” and executive-planning function, which can alleviate depression symptoms. In one study, adolescents skilled in the kitchen reported lower levels of depression than less culinarily inclined peers.

In simple terms, cooking commands your full attention and all of your senses. You must juggle skills, whether culinary (slicing), cognitive (planning), or creative (constructing a meal from ostensibly incongruous leftovers in the fridge). You might feel raw rice through your fingers, hear knives clattering on cutting boards, smell a turkey roasting. Cooking, Farmer suggests, can boost self-confidence; it also facilitates social bonding when meals are shared.

[Read: What home cooking does that restaurants can’t]

Now in my 40s, I remember one college summer, proudly leaving my shifts at a bakery heaving an enormous black bag over my shoulder, Santa-style, with the day’s bounty of unsold treats. My five roommates and I largely subsisted on leftover muffins for dinner—they were both filling and free. And weren’t the berries lodged in them part of a major food group? Among the skills I acquired in the winding thicket of young adulthood, cooking was not one.

But my friends’ teenage son, who told me he hadn’t known that he liked to cook before the pandemic, recently served eight of us a dinner of chicken with lemon and garlic sauce, red-lentil soup, and flan. He is preparing to leave for college, but learned how to make shakshuka for breakfast from a viral video. He can taste something in a restaurant and replicate it at home. Whether or not Gen Z has read The Joy of Cooking, it has navigated its own relationship with food through historical disaster, and ended up with both a life skill and a craft.