Since COVID-19 restrictions eased, many companies have been calling their employees back to the office.

Some executives and leaders believe productivity increases when workers are in the office together, while others hope to increase in-person collaboration. Some employers are taking extremes to get people back, tracking attendance or threatening to terminate workers who don’t comply.

For most of the past decade, A.I. chatbots have been terrible — impressive only if you cherry-pick the bot’s best responses and throw out the rest. In recent years, a few A.I. tools have gotten good at doing narrow and well-defined tasks, like writing marketing copy, but they still tend to flail when taken outside their comfort zones. (Witness what happened when my colleagues Priya Krishna and Cade Metz used GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to come up with a menu for Thanksgiving dinner.)

But ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible.

Explosive growth has been the norm in the tech sector for the past decade.

When the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the world and moved more of daily life online, tech hiring blazed across Silicon Valley even more. Some major tech companies, like Amazon and Facebook parent company Meta, doubled the number of people they employed to stay apace with new demand.

But now, the exuberance is fading.