Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a major impact on the creative arts. This does not just apply to books and articles, but also to artistic images, music and video. Large language models (LLMs), the underlying basis of generative AI, are capable of writing a poem, a song or an essay, and generating an image, cartoon…
The oil and gas industries are some of the largest in the world, with a market size of over $7 trillion. Just over half of that is exploration and production, the rest being refining and distribution. It employs over 12 million people, with a further 60 million employed indirectly by its suppliers. While an oil…
We have grown used to computers behaving consistently. If you type a formula into Excel to multiply two numbers together, not only will the answer be correct, but it will produce the same result when you next open the spreadsheet. This is not the way that large language models (LLMS), the models underlying generative AI,…
Chatbots, driven by the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI, have become a part of everyday life. Customer help desks have often been replaced by an AI assistant, or are used in conjunction with human support staff. They can be quite effective, with a Harvard study in 2025 finding that human customer service…
All generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are based on artificial neural networks that are trained on huge amounts of data, such as text or images. The large language models (LLMs) that underlie this technology are voracious in their need to ingest training data in massive quantities. Some of the…
Science fiction is full of AIs that have gone rogue. The HAL 9000 computer in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” determined that the crew of the spaceship it operated was superfluous to its mission and attempted to kill them all when it suspected they were plotting to shut it down. When…
Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular its trendiest flavour, called generative AI, is having an increasing impact on the world’s environment. The large language models (LLMs) that are the basis of generative AI require prodigious computing resources. An LLM needs to be trained on data and, once up and running, then produces answers to user prompts.…
With all the current levels of excitement about generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of chatbots like ChatGPT and its rivals, it is easy to forget that the scope of AI goes well beyond this particular strand of AI. The media is awash with stories about the large language models (LLMs) that underpin generative…
Most of us by now will have tried using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Grok. They are hard to avoid, with, for example, Google now putting AI-generated answers at the top of its queries, with sometimes amusing results. However, if you are to implement one of these generative AI tools…
Large language models (LLMs) are the underlying technology of popular generative AI applications like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok. They are well known for their ability to generate fluent text in response to natural language prompts from users, such as: “write me an essay on the industrial revolution”, or “draft me a letter for…