We were able to identify vaccine candidates that would be effective against the virus really, really quickly - in a matter of weeks - because companies like Moderna had invested quite heavily in AI-based platforms for discovering such candidates.

As Prof Wooldridge points out, there have been dramatic advances in AI over the last decade, from instant translation to image recognition - even if the robot butlers we were promised have yet to arrive. But our worries have too often focused on the wrong dangers - that the technology will achieve consciousness and kill us, or that robots will cause mass unemployment.

"The new space race at the geopolitical level is for computational power. Who can gather the most data and process that data the fastest? That is why both China and the US, frankly the EU as well, are spending a lot of money on quantum computers, incredibly fast supercomputers. And all of these things require chips," she explains.

It could be evidence that artificial intelligence has made a great leap forward and human writers and software developers will soon be redundant. Or maybe it is just the latest example of the hype getting way ahead of the reality? On this week's Tech Tent we find out what the big fuss is about something called GPT-3. OpenAI is a Californian company started in 2015 with a high-minded mission - to ensure that artificial general intelligence systems that could outperform humans in most jobs would benefit all humanity. It was founded as a non-profit with generous donations from Elon Musk among others but was quickly transformed into a for-profit business, with Microsoft investing $1bn.

It could be evidence that artificial intelligence has made a great leap forward and human writers and software developers will soon be redundant. Or maybe it is just the latest example of the hype getting way ahead of the reality? On this week's Tech Tent we find out what the big fuss is about something called GPT-3. OpenAI is a Californian company started in 2015 with a high-minded mission - to ensure that artificial general intelligence systems that could outperform humans in most jobs would benefit all humanity. It was founded as a non-profit with generous donations from Elon Musk among others but was quickly transformed into a for-profit business, with Microsoft investing $1bn.

If there's one area where there's real excitement about the improvements in our lives which advances in artificial intelligence could bring, it is healthcare. On Tech Tent this week we ask whether, amidst all the hope and hype, real innovations are beginning to transform the way patients are treated. At Oxford University's Said Business School, some of the leading thinkers in AI research - from the university and beyond - gathered this week. There were fascinating discussions about everything from autonomous cars to the way AI is transforming the finance industry. But the panels on healthcare drew big crowds and a sense that researchers were on the cusp of delivering concrete results which will soon begin to be seen in hospitals.

Are recent strides in artificial intelligence more about computers becoming better at matching patterns than about real human-like understanding of tasks? Plus, why a mysterious Russian satellite displaying "very abnormal behaviour" has raised alarm in the US. And is the richness of spoken English at risk from speaking to AI assistants?

Computers are getting ever better at recognising different faces - but on this week's Tech Tent we ask whether facial recognition technology is just too big a threat to privacy. That is certainly the view of the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. This week the rights group urged Amazon to stop providing its Rekognition facial recognition technology to American police forces, saying a guide for the software "reads like a user manual for authoritarian surveillance". Amazon responded robustly, saying the quality of life would be much worse if new technologies were blocked because of how they might be used. But Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties lawyer for the ACLU in California, says the tech firm has unlocked something really dangerous: "This technology can be turned against protesters - it can be targeted at immigrants, and it can be used to spy on entire neighbourhoods."

We have already had to wake up to fake news - will we soon have to stop trusting video and audio news too as artificial intelligence makes it easier to create convincing fakes? On Tech Tent this week we look at the advances in technology which allow you to get anybody to say anything, and explore their implications. It was a video featuring Barack Obama talking about a character from the hit movie Black Panther, and then making a crude remark about Donald Trump, which raised new concerns about this subject. It was not of course genuine - the actor Jordan Peele's voice had been synced to the lips of the former US president. The video was created by Buzzfeed using software called FakeApp, a freely available tool which has also been used to superimpose the faces of celebrities into porn videos.

On this week's Tech Tent we hear why China's determination to be a leading player in artificial intelligence could lead to tensions with the United States. We have two other reports on this week's programme.