Paul Taylor

The computer scientist​ Geoffrey Hinton estimated early in 2024 that there was a 10 per cent chance of AI wiping out humanity in the next twenty years. It was clear then that AI threatened to be hugely disruptive, but the idea that it was an existential threat seemed faintly ludicrous: how could a program that simply issued a response to a prompt become a malevolent force? In the last few...

It is possible​ that the first profession to be replaced by artificial intelligence will be that of computer programmer. As large language models become more powerful, there are concerns about their possible impact on jobs in fields such as medicine, law and banking, but these are still conversations about possibilities. The situation in programming is different: the technology works, and...

In October last year​ 2.17 million people, 507,000 of them children, were in contact with mental health services in England. In 2023-24, 958,000 children, 8 per cent of the twelve million children in England, had an active referral to the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services. In 2013-14 this figure was 157,000. Some see in this huge increase evidence of welcome attention...

When​ DeepSeek announced the release of its chatbot in January, there was widespread bewilderment. How had a Chinese company been able to develop something that could compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini despite a US export ban on the latest Nvidia chips that almost all large language models rely on? DeepSeek said it had built its model at a cost of only $5.5...