I have no idea how to talk about sport. This was a disadvantage when growing up as a teenager at an all boy’s school. I felt as if I’d missed an important lesson, or failed to read the manual that the other boys had been issued at an early age. How else did everybody else have a vocabulary, a set of concepts, a whole language, that was opaque to me?

I initially felt the same way when attempting to learn in public about generative AI, the set of solutions such as ChatGPT and DALL-E which are receiving a lot of attention right now.

This was the week when I was supposed to read a few more detailed papers, to find a couple of books, and to go deep enough to get to grips with the main concepts. However, I found that, unlike my similar experiment with quantum computing, it was hard to find accessible entry points. Perhaps this is because, despite rapid developments in recent years, the ideas behind quantum computing have been around for a long while - long enough for experts to write introductions for curious laypeople like me. By contrast, most of the material describing generative AI technologies was quite new, and either so high level that it told me little I didn’t already know (and much that I had reason to be sceptical of), or dived so deep that I was as baffled as if listening to the dissection of a football match. No-one has had time to write the accessible introduction yet.