This is the Guardian.

About this time last year, I started to notice something happening on what was then known as Twitter.

You want an excuse for not attending a meeting written in the voice of Werner Herzog.

Done.

A verse in the style of the King James Bible about how to remove a peanut butter sandwich

from a VCR easy or a fun podcast intro about intelligent machines sorted. People were having

a lot of fun with a new program called ChatGPT. A

chatbot fed billions and billions of words so that it could come up with

responses to almost anything you asked it,

instantaneously.

But as the rest of us were getting AI to write strange recipes, silly songs or funny limericks,

some experts began to warn that we were entering the realm of dangerously strong AI. Fast forward a year, and while we haven't been made obsolete yet,

the conversation around artificial intelligence is only getting more important, as we consider how it's going to be used and how it should

be regulated. So today we're asking how far AI has come.

Could it ever be sentient?

And what would that mean?

And we'll be getting answers from someone who's been thinking about these questions for more than 30 years.

From the Guardian I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.

Nicola Davis, you're a science correspondent at The Guardian, and earlier this year you caught up with Michael Waldridge, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, who's giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

And he's going to be unraveling the myths and the mysteries of AI.

I mean this year really feels like the year that AI went mainstream and it was all

kicked off by the launch of chat gPT in November 2022.

...