But, as with the cryptocurrency gold rush, scammers aren’t the only ones rushing in to capitalise on the new generation of machine-learning software, the so-called “generative AI” software that can perform tasks ranging from writing to poems and drawing pictures, to writing software and filling out forms. The world’s biggest software companies, including Google’s parent Alphabet, Microsoft, China’s Baidu, Salesforce, even Meta itself, have all swarmed into the space opened up by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, too. And researchers and executives from those companies have been leaving, seemingly in droves, to found their own machine-learning startups, often addressing niche applications of generative...