AI chip maker Nvidia was briefly the world’s most valuable company last week, having risen 40 per cent in a month, which is what small companies do, not big ones like that.

Also Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist known as the father of artificial intelligence, told 60 Minutes that AI might be more intelligent than we know already and will eventually “take over”, whatever that means.

And one of the founders of Open AI, Ilya Sutskever, launched his own start-up to take on Open AI, called Safe Superintelligence. Presumably his won’t take over.

So this might be a good time to step back and reflect some more about what is going on.

First, the idea that AI will take over and enslave humanity is worrying, for sure, but this is a product that everyone thinks will make tons of money, and so as periodically happens in capitalism, there’s a mad scramble to be the winner, oblivious to dangers, accompanied by stupendous amounts of money and perplexed enthusiasm in the media.

It is already way beyond the capacity of governments to control, even if they wanted to, which they don’t because they’re in a parallel geopolitical contest, especially the US and China.

Maybe one day we’ll wake up and say: “Oh, whoops, AI wasn’t such a great idea”, as we did with slavery, fossil fuels, tobacco and sugar but for the moment, it’s happening – there’s too much money being made. Stand back.

There are three basic forms of AI: Generative, which involves creating stuff, Cognitive, making decisions, and Analytical, which does what its name suggests.

The focus at the moment is on generative AI, and the most common form of it, where most of the money is going, are large language models (LLMs).

An LLM is a type of algorithm that generates human-like text from large amounts of data – basically everything........

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