The War of the Worlds (1898), the much-acclaimed novel of the prescient author HG Wells, portrays a conflict between humankind and Martians as a survival of the fittest, with the Martians being able to create far more advanced weapons than humans because of their superior intelligence. The conflict, predicted by Wells, appears ready to play out, with homegrown AI assuming the role of the villainous Martians. AI is a hugely underestimated entity, though time and again it has been demonstrated that super-intelligence is a more appropriate word for what we commonly refer to as Artificial Intelligence (AI), because things as basic as an abacus board and a calculator are also examples of artificial intelligence.

But AI is in a different league altogether; much ahead of humans, both in intelligence and performance; on September 8, OpenAI announced that with the help of AI, they had found a “singularity” in the Navier-Stokes equations in three dimensions ~ thus resolving one of the six remaining Millennium Prize Problems posed in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute, each of which carried a $1 million prize. The Navier-Stokes differential equations are used to describe how fluids, from ocean currents to air flows, behave. They were first postulated in the mid-nineteenth century, but no one was able to identify the point at which some infinitesimally small part of the fluid would begin to flow infinitely quickly, creating a so-called singularity.

It took a group of 10,000 autonomous AI agents, working under the directions of mathematicians at Open AI, exactly 105 hours to crack the problem. For the amount of controversy it has created, AI has a very short history; the Large Language Model, Generative Pre-trained Transformer-1 (GPT-1) was released by Open AI in 2018. However, it was the consumer-facing chatbot ChatGPT released in late 2022 that caught public attention. Inter-alia, ChatGPT was used by students to complete homework, executives to write reports, lawyers to draft petitions, and authors to write plays.

The public was alarmed as there was a grave danger of teachers, bosses and judges getting fooled, and also of AI, instead of humans, being deployed for routine tasks. The success of Open AI’s LLMs prompted giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Chinese companies like Deep Seek, to join the AI bandwagon. Trillions, were invested in AI development, with US$2.5 trillion likely to be spent in the current year alone. A confluence of unlimited funds and brilliant minds has led to mind-boggling outcomes; Nvidia briefly became the world’s first US$5 trillion company, and........

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