If you access a large language model (LLM) at home in your web browser or app, then you appear to be directly interacting with the model. In actual fact there is extra software surrounding this conversation. Before your query is passed to the LLM, there are multiple software components that handle your prompt, as shown…
Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” may have been written 2,600 years ago, but is proving relevant to the AI age. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has long had a reputation for issuing dramatic warnings about the risks posed by frontier AI. In 2019, when he was Research Director of OpenAI (before he left to…
When an AI agent is asked to keep an email secret from another user, you would hope that it would find a way of doing this without destroying the email server, but you would be disappointed. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to “agentic AI”, whereby AI…
The Black Mirror TV series explored dystopian futures, and one of its recurring themes was the idea of a digital life after death. This was the theme of no less than three episodes: Be Right Back (2013), San Junipero (2016) and Eulogy (2025). As often with science fiction, life is not far behind, and there…
In recent years, there has been much speculation about the possibility of the emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI). This is an AI that would match or exceed human intelligence in most or all tasks. Such an AI would reason, learn, remember, innovate and adapt to new environments without the need for training or retraining.…
There are a range of security concerns associated with large language models (LLMs), which are the basis of popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. For one thing, the chatbots themselves are vulnerable to malicious prompts from anyone who interacts with them. Such “prompt injection” attacks can cause LLMs to behave in…
The web browsing market has been relatively stable for some years, with Google Chrome holding 72% market share in 2025, ahead of Apple’s Safari at 12%. These are followed by Microsoft Edge, Firefox and Opera. Recently, the AI chatbot vendors have decided to muscle in on this market, and existing incumbents have added AI features…
Large language models (LLMs), the engines at the heart of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok are susceptible to various kinds of attack by hackers. For example, prompt injection is where an attacker fills a prompt with malicious input to either leak data or bypass controls. There are actually many other types…
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) have been with us on a large scale for almost three years now, ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Their impact on the world is undeniable, with around two-thirds of companies using them to a greater or lesser degree by mid-2025. There…
Human beings can be devious. We are capable of trickery and deceit, of withholding information, cheating or lying. The term “Machiavellian” is used for deceitful, manipulative behaviour in pursuit of personal gain or status over ethical principles. Given the increasing role in our lives of artificial intelligence (AI) and the large language models (LLMs) used…