ChatGPT, the chat-based artificial intelligence tool developed by the San Francisco company OpenAI, wowed the world when it was released in November 2022. In the intervening months, schoolchildren and students have used it to cheat on essays and exams, while shrewd businesspeople have overhauled the way they work to take advantage of its ability to generate content to precise prompts. It’s gone well beyond the average user who, say, tinkered with seeing how far it could get an AI facsimile of Shakespeare to write an episode of EastEnders. But the AI revolution then pales in comparison with OpenAI’s latest release, GPT-4, which was unleashed on the world on Tuesday (14 March). GPT-4 supercharges ChatGPT: it can handle and understand images it is shown, as well ...

British politics will soon enter election mode. All the talk will be of “big choices”, “forks in the road” and “dividing lines”. But as the rhetoric escalates, a more banal reality is revealing itself: convergence between the Conservatives and Labour. Jeremy Hunt’s first Budget as Chancellor represented perhaps the clearest instance of this yet. Faced with a modest improvement in the economic outlook, Hunt did not choose to reduce the overall tax burden. Instead, he funded further state largesse: 30 hours a week of free childcare for one- and two-year-olds; a three-month extension of the £2,500 energy price guarantee (a policy dismissed by Hunt’s political patron David Cameron as “Marxist” when proposed by Ed Miliband). As a consequence, the tax burden is ...

“Is there an election coming?” asked the former Lib Dem pensions minister Steve Webb today, shortly after the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced a change to pensions that abolished the lifetime allowance, effectively allowing higher earners to put as much into their pensions as they like without it being subjected to tax. The lifetime allowance rule was introduced by Gordon Brown in 2006. It targeted the very wealthiest by capping the amount they can save into a pension at just under £1.1m, after which point they are hit by a tax of either 25 per cent or 55 per cent, depending on how they withdraw the money. Now, in what Hunt insisted was an effort to prevent NHS consultants from disappearing into ...

What is a Budget? It is a day of political theatre. It’s an opportunity to shift the direction of the country. It’s a chance to shift resources in new directions. And it’s a progress report: a moment when we’re able to look around and assess where, economically, we've got to. As theatre, today’s Budget won few stars. The Tory benches were muted, although not mutinous. There were no rabbits leaping nimbly from moth-eaten top hats, although no Trussite mad March hares either. The Budget’s tempo was a dogged plod. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have set the course and everything now depends on the economy recovering faster from its Tory-driven crash than the experts predict. So not much theatre and no new ...

Consider how seductive those times were, from the end of the Cold War through to the day before the 9/11 attacks, which plunged the world into darkness. Consider the rhetoric in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The swagger and liberal triumphalism. The arc of history bends towards progress and enlightenment. The world is flat. Market-driven globalisation is inevitable. No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other. Economic liberalisation will lead to political liberalisation. The kaleidoscope has been shaken and now is the time to reorder the world. We don’t need me to name names. We know who the rhetoricians were. And we all know what they got wrong, what ...

On paper, the Chancellor’s pledge to spend £4bn on Britain’s beleaguered childcare sector looks generous – it is certainly a more generous provision than most people expected. Jeremy Hunt's Budget is expected to extend the current scheme of 15 to 30 free hours of childcare, which covers three- and four-year-olds, to those aged one and two. As a working mother, whose youngest child is seven months old, the prospect of extra help with childcare costs is desperately welcome. As a journalist who has spent the past few weeks speaking to experts and researching childcare policy, I can see that Hunt’s proposals could – paradoxically – have a disastrous effect on the sector, by forcing more providers out of business and ...

Gary Lineker’s long-standing agent and friend, Jon Holmes, has shed new light on what went on behind the scenes between the Match of the Day host and BBC bosses over the weekend. In a diary for this week's New Statesman, Holmes revealed that Lineker felt he had a “special agreement” in place with Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, that allowed him to tweet about refugees and immigration, an area of “passionate interest” for the former England footballer. Apparently, at least as of last Friday, 10 March, Davie didn’t see things this way. Holmes revealed that, as Lineker’s representative, he was summoned to a meeting at Broadcasting House in London at 2.30pm that day. “We didn’t achieve much,” he wrote, “but when they asked ...

As an Anglican cleric I’ve seen numerous people at the end of their lives. Frankly, it’s not like in the movies. Films only seem comfortable when depicting violent and sudden demise; the long, drawn-out, agonising banality of hospital death seems too frightening, perhaps too real and inevitable, for them to handle. It’s seldom easy. The idea of the “good death” is often a misnomer, even an oxymoron. There can be the relatively painless slide, surrounded by loved ones, but I wish I could say that was common. Nor should we be terrified by what is usually eased by medication and care. Medical staff who work with the dying never cease to amaze me. Then there are the other cases. Those who wake ...