After ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all – Apple – was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology. Finally, at its annual World Wide Developers' Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. For Apple, "AI" would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated – something called "Apple Intelligence". It was not, as the veteran Apple-watcher John Gruber put it, a single thing or product but "a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services". Putting it all under a single, memorable label made it easier for users to understand that Apple was launching something really novel.

There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We've just lived through a few weeks like that. We've known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity. And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US.

There's a moment in the 1967 film The Graduate that has become renowned. At a party thrown by his parents to celebrate his graduation, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) is approached by Mr McGuire, an elderly bore who wants to say "just one word" to him: "plastics". "Exactly how do you mean?", asks the hapless Ben. "There's a great future in plastics," says McGuire. "Think about it." Listening last week to the spending plans of the techlords who run Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta leads one to wonder if something analogous might have happened to them on their graduation nights. Except that in their cases, the magic word would have been "AI".

Nothing cheers up a tech columnist more than the sight of 600bn being wiped off the market cap of an overvalued tech giant in a single day. And yet last Monday that's what happened to Nvidia, the leading maker of electronic picks and shovels for the AI gold rush. It was the biggest one-day slump for any company in history, and it was not alone – shares of companies in semiconductor, power and infrastructure industries exposed to AI collectively shed more than 1tn in value on the same day. The proximate cause of this chaos was the news that a Chinese tech startup of whom few had hitherto heard had released DeepSeek R1, a powerful AI assistant that was much cheaper to train and operate than the dominant models of the US tech giants – and yet was comparable in competence to OpenAI's o1 "reasoning" model. Just to illustrate the difference: R1 was said to have cost only 5.58m to build, which is small change compared with the billions that OpenAI and co have spent on their models; and R1 is about 15 times more efficient (in terms of resource use) than anything comparable made by Meta. The DeepSeek app immediately zoomed to the top of the Apple app store, where it attracted huge numbers of users who were clearly unfazed by the fact that the terms and conditions and the privacy policy they needed to accept were in Chinese.

AI means too many (different) things to too many people. We need better ways of talking – and thinking – about it. Cue, Drew Breunig, a gifted geek and cultural anthropologist, who has come up with a neat categorisation of the technology into three use cases: gods, interns and cogs. "Gods", in this sense, would be "super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously". In other words, the AGI (artificial general intelligence) that OpenAI's Sam Altman and his crowd are trying to build (at unconscionable expense), while at the same time warning that it could be an existential threat to humanity. AI gods are, Breunig says, the "human replacement use cases".

Way back in 2011 Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist with aspirations to be a public intellectual, published an essay entitled "Why Software Is Eating the World", predicting that computer code would take over large swaths of the economy. Thirteen years on, software now seems to be chomping its way through academia as well. This, at any rate, is one possible conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton shares the 2024 Nobel prize in physics with John Hopfield, and that the computer scientist Demis Hassabis shares half of the Nobel prize in chemistry with one of his DeepMind colleagues, John Jumper. The award to Hassabis and Jumper was, in a way, predictable, for they built a machine – AlphaFold2 – that enables researchers to solve one of the toughest problems in biochemistry: predicting the structure of proteins, the building blocks of biological life. Their machine has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200m proteins that researchers have identified.

In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: "What are the contents of the'vague tech canon'? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?" He was using the term "canon" in the sense of "the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre", but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave. Greer's challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value 65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn't "the list of books that I think one ought to read – it's just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here".

Innovation,

Earlier last week, just around the time when the driver of Rishi Sunak's armoured Jaguar might have been thinking about typing "Bletchley Park" into the limousine's satnav, Joe Biden was in the White House putting his signature on a new executive order "on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence". In a mere 20,000 words, or thereabouts, the order directs an innumerable number of federal agencies and government departments that oversee "everything from housing to health to national security to create standards and regulations for the use or oversight of AI". These bodies are required to develop guidance on the responsible use of AI in areas such as criminal justice, education, healthcare, housing and labour, "with a focus on protecting Americans' civil rights and liberties". Within No 10, though, there might have been some infuriated spin doctors. After all, the main purpose of the Bletchley Park AI safety summit was to hype the prime minister's claim to "global leadership" in this matter, and here was bloody Biden announcing tangible plans actually to do something about the technology rather than just fostering lofty "declarations".

Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through "serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google – which has between 90% and 95% of the search market – has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look. Basically, because the US government has been asleep at the wheel for almost a quarter of a century and has finally woken up to its democratic responsibilities. The last time it stirred itself to take on an aggressive monopolist was in 2001, when it sued Microsoft for illegally tying its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as part of a (successful) campaign to destroy Netscape, maker of the first distinctive commercial web browser, which Bill Gates and co perceived as a potentially lethal competitive threat.