More than three years after the generative AI explosion that started with ChatGPT, we are seeing a distinctly mixed picture in terms of AI adoption and productivity. In February 2026, the Goldman Sachs Chief Economist assessed the effect of AI on US productivity as “basically zero”, and multiple studies have found that the failure rate…
In June 2025, Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux and Git, was asked about “vibe coding”, where non-programmers use large language models to write code. He memorably described it as “Very Inefficient But Entertaining”. However, the world of AI is far from static, and the release of Claude Opus 4.5 in November 2025 seems to…
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said that “no one understands quantum mechanics”, despite his having delivered a famous set of lectures on the subject. Despite this drawback, many companies, such as Google, IBM and others, are now building small, early working models of quantum computers, which promise to solve certain classes of mathematical problems drastically faster…
You may be aware that a large language model (LLM) is trained on data, but did you know that there is a multi-billion-dollar industry of human data labelling that supports this? Behind every LLM lies an invisible workforce that toils away, labelling files, images and videos to help train the AIs. A large language model…
We are used to dealing with multiple sensory inputs: the information from our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. We combine this information to make decisions easily and unconsciously. By contrast, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) have been mostly restricted to a single mode of communication – text.…
The word “robot” was coined in K. Čapek’s play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ in 1920, which depicted artificial beings created to perform manual labour. The word “robot” (“robota: in Czech) literally means “drudgery”. Well before this, in 1770, “The Mechanical Turk” was exhibited, which played chess very well, but this turned out to just be a…
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…
Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst on the scene in November 2022, there has been a buzz of excitement about the possible use cases for generative AI. From medical imaging to writing marketing material, from generating illustrations to translating between languages, generative AI has created a popular wave of awareness that is rare for a new…
In the emerging world of AI, how can we get the best out of our new silicon helpers? Large language models (LLMs) are the basis of all generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, LLAMA and Gemini. They can understand and generate human text based on huge amounts of training data, such as large…
Generative AI has a wide range of possible applications across industries, but it is being more widely applied in some areas than others. A late 2024 Economist Impact Report global survey of 1,100 executives and technologists showed that IT, marketing and customer service are the three most popular areas for its deployment. The survey notes that…