Conference producers organize conversations for a living, and one of the joys of the job is watching an idea whose time has come explode into the public consciousness after years of quietly doing important work out of the limelight.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Within two months it already had over 100 million active users, making it the fastest growing consumer application ever to date. As an interactive tool and toy, it has captured people’s imaginations and made Artificial Intelligence a topic of everyday conversation from boardroom tables to breakfast tables.

As unlikely as it would have sounded two years ago, just about everyone nowadays has at least a passing understanding of how Large Language Models work, and most people have asked with varying degrees of trepidation or excitement, “But what does AI mean for me?”