This month's issue completes our 28th year of publishing SEN. Believe or not, we still have members who've been with us since the beginning back in 1997.

If you're one of them, you remember the likes of Infoseek, AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo, among others. Google hadn't even set up space in their Menlo Park garage back then. It would be a whole 1½ years before that would happen — and another few years before they started competing with the search engines of the early 21^st century.

Of course, it was the wild west days of the internet back then and we all know what has happened since.

Today, it feels much like it did then. Only it's the wild west days of AI. Last year I wrote that...

It feels like everything is caught in a current that is moving us forward whether we like it or not. And the current keeps getting stronger. The problem is, nobody knows for sure exactly where it's going.

Still true — but the current is going way-way faster now!

What I find curious, however, is the fact that most people believe there are only two major players in AI — Google's Gemini vs OpenAI's ChatGPT.

While it's true these are the players getting most of the attention, they are not the only players. And there are forces brewing on the horizon that could effect change in ways we haven't yet anticipated.

For one, the regulatory issues that Google is facing could change the landscape significantly and unpredictably sometime in the near future. And, the various factions that are lobbying to throttle the development of generative AI is another.

In addition, many of us are exhausted by the incessant tracking schemes that silo us into ...