On 30 November 2022, the world was introduced to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) AI, initially intended as a “research preview” to seek feedback from the public. What ensued was viral uptake and commentary around the technology, which dwarfed the prior year’s “metaverse” hype. Over the summer, Google Trends data suggested ChatGPT’s peak popularity was already behind it, but this trend reversed as its first birthday approached (Figure 1).

Human and artificial intelligence

AI, the concept of emulating human intelligence, is far from new. Humans have feared superhuman intelligence since prehistory. We developed the curious behaviour of attributing to it unexplained phenomena and currying its favour through prayer and ritual. More recently, the intelligence of machines was famously pondered in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In 2017, DARPA contextualised AI into three overlapping waves: handcrafted knowledge, statistical learning, and contextual adaptation. Each are appraised on their strengths and weaknesses in perceiving, learning, abstracting and reasoning.