"New Wave Artificial Intelligence” appeared almost out of thin air approximately 2.5 years ago, after several quiet decades of "the winter of AI". But this new AI has many oddities: While it does some very impressive things, it is not clear whether it is a tool or an agent, no one really understands how it works, and it sometimes "hallucinates". In this presentation, I will argue that we need to understand the past and present of this "new paradigm" of AI in order to be able to say something about its future, and outline the social transformation it is poised to bring into our lives.