Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
The pharmaceutical industry was worth $1.6 trillion in 2024, employing around 8 million people directly and up to 75 million people indirectly. Various flavours of artificial intelligence show considerable promise in these industries. AI can be utilised in various applications, including research and drug discovery, clinical trials, operations such as manufacturing, and for other purposes,…
The 26th of August 2025 may end up being quite a significant day when the definitive history book of AI is published. I had written previously about the unresolved issue of copyright associated with the training of large language models (LLMs), which underlie the generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and also the…
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as ChatGPT and its rivals, depends heavily on training data, but what if that training data is deliberately poisoned? The large language models (LLMs) technology that underlie generative AI go through three stages of training. The models are fed vast amounts of raw data, such as The Common Corpus,…
Financial services make up at least a fifth of the entire global economy. It has always been a heavy user of technology, investing at least triple as much in technology as the retail sector or manufacturing. Given this, it is unsurprising that financial services have also been early adopters of artificial intelligence (AI). It is…
Those of us who live in the West tend to associate AI with the USA and Silicon Valley. The titans of the AI industry, from specialist software companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, to platform vendors like Microsoft and Google, to hardware companies like NVIDIA, are all headquartered in the USA. Most Western citizens have barely…
The retail industry has long been a heavy technology user, from the cash register to vending machines to the credit card and the advent of e-commerce. It employs around 500 million people across the world. It is no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into many aspects of retail, from customer service…
It is now almost three years since ChatGPT was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Two months later, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest adopted consumer application in history. A torrent of money was thrown at AI, from venture capital firms backing AI start-ups (a third of all venture capital went into AI…
There is little doubt that the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, and the tsunami of artificial intelligence (AI) investment that followed had a seismic impact on the global economy. In Q2 2025 $40 billion, or 45% of all venture capital (VC) funding, went to AI-related companies, according to Crunchbase. On the day that I…
Self-driving cars have been a science fiction staple for years, featuring in movies like “Demolition Man” and “Total Recall”. Given that 1.2 million people a year die in accidents on the roads, it is hardly surprising that people have been trying to make this particular piece of fiction into reality for quite some time. The…
The first use of an unmanned aerial explosive device was when the Austrian army deployed hundreds of balloons carrying explosives in their siege of Venice, which was fighting for independence against Austria. That was in 1849. Technology has moved on since then, but the use of drones has been a military tactic for longer than…