At your service, at your throat

While much of the tech landscape is suffering from tumbling valuations and the ugly reality of delivering the order of the boot to great chunks of the workforce, there is one particular niche where investors are hurling money at anything with a pulse.

Since OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT late last year to massed roars of delight from schoolchildren the world over once they realised they’d never have to write an essay all by themselves again, generative artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups have been able to raise fortunes with little more than a business plan.

OpenAI is leading the charge with an investment from Microsoft rumoured to be worth $10bn over a number of years, and Inflection is typical of a raft of start-ups seeking to build on the transformative power of the technology. The company is only a year old, its website consists of four rather vague paragraphs and it is yet to release a product, yet it is looking to raise up to $675m as it attempts to build an AI personal assistant for the web.

The company was set up by LinkedIn creator Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman, who was a founder of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for £400m in 2014. It has been poaching AI experts from all the prospective competitors to power its ambition to design a product that will help users to make bookings and purchases online, and the product it is testing should be launched soon. As in many other job categories, the living, breathing personal assistants should be nervous that it won’t be long before they’re automated into oblivion.

To say that this has proved to be an excellent investment would be something of an exaggeration