At times it felt less like Succession than Fawlty Towers, not so much Shakespearean tragedy as Laurel and Hardy farce. OpenAI is the hottest tech company today thanks to the success of its most famous product, the chatbot ChatGPT. It was inevitable that the mayhem surrounding the sacking, and subsequent rehiring, of Sam Altman as its CEO would play out across global media last week, accompanied by astonishment and bemusement in equal measure. For some, the farce spoke to the incompetence of the board; for others, to a clash of monstrous egos. In a deeper sense, the turmoil also reflected many of the contradictions at the heart of the tech industry. The contradiction between the self-serving myth of tech entrepreneurs as rebel "disruptors", and their control of a multibillion-dollar monster of an industry through which they shape all our lives.

As the capabilities of natural language processing technology continue to advance, there is a growing hype around the potential of chatbots and conversational AI systems. One such system, ChatGPT, claims to be able to engage in natural, human-like conversation and even provide useful information and advice. However, there are valid concerns about the limitations of ChatGPT and other conversational AI systems, and their ability to truly replicate human intelligence and interaction. No, I didn't write that. It was actually written by ChatGPT itself, a conversational AI software program, after I asked it to create "an opening paragraph to an article sceptical about the abilities of ChatGPT in the style of Kenan Malik". And it is not difficult to see why there has been such excitement, indeed hype, about the latest version of the chatbot since it was released a week ago.

So a machine can now not only demolish you at chess or devastate you in Jeopardy, it can also outwit you on Question Time. Last week, in a public debate in San Francisco, IBM pitted its Project Debater software program against human opponents, including Noa Ovadia, Israel's national debating champion in 2016. Each participant had four minutes in which to make an opening statement, followed by a four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute conclusion. Drawing on a library of hundreds of millions of newspaper articles and academic papers, and some pre-installed arguments, the machine held its own. "I can't say it makes my blood boil, because I have no blood," it quipped, "but it seems some people naturally suspect technology because it's new." Project Debater is a remarkable achievement.