This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here .

The first time I attended a Meta developer conference devoted primarily to bots was a decade ago. In 2016, the company then known as Facebook released a bot platform for Facebook Messenger. Rudimentary machine-learning models let developers from 1-800-FLOWERS, CNN, and other companies build automated systems to interact with customers, helping them to make purchases or get headlines delivered to them directly.

At the time, Silicon Valley had been consumed by an interest in bots , which its boosters hoped would shift more and more internet activity to messaging apps. "Messaging is going to be the interface — or the anti-interface — of the next phase of the internet," the entrepreneur Robin Chan, who then ran a bot-based e-commerce app named Operator, told me at the time.…