OpenAI has, to somewhat understate it, set the cat among the pigeons. Transformer models are not that new, and not that novel. What OpenAI did however is invest a lot of time and effort to create one which they then gifted to the public. This unleashed a mad scramble in the tech world. In the short time since ChatGPT was released (2022-11-30), Microsoft hatched plans to add it to virtually every line of code they have ever owned. Worried about a potential Kodak moment of their own, Google, who wrote the paper that created these models, even recalled Larry and Sergey. Mark Benioff would have only had time for the world's shortest epiphany-laden sabbatical before Salesforce announced plans for a more intelligent Einstein. Even Bloomberg, that gargantuan repository of random numbers, had to do something.

This mass panic by the world's biggest and wealthiest firms did not go unnoticed. Many famous tech professionals and academics protested by 'liking' a blog, while Eliezer Yudkowsky almost had an aneurysm.

And where were you and I while the informed world was losing its collective artificial neurons? Well, I don't know where you were, but I, for one, was not sitting around picking the lint from my navel. No sir, I was using this potentially humanity-ending technology to write a sternly worded email to my neighbour about his aggressive dog.

But fear not, it's not too late for you and me. I propose that we explore LLMs together at an altogether more leisurely pace because there is no sense risking a hamstring injury if we come out of the blocks sprinting.