We also can't deny the fact that underpinning this entire tech revolution is an ocean of investor cash.

"I'm not worried about the existential risks of AI, I'm worried about the corporate greed of the companies that are creating it," says Sasha Luccioni, the founder of Sustainable AI.

Leading computer scientist Professor Dame Wendy Hall, who has advised the UN about AI, says the current crisis is all about the companies not behaving responsibly enough.

She likens the current situation to a farmer having a bull in a field which escapes and causes destruction – and the farmer blames the bull.

"Of course it's not the bull's fault – it's the farmer," she says. Clearly, the fences weren't robust enough, and that is exactly what she says we are seeing with AI guardrails right now.

But if those guardrails become too restrictive, could this spell the end of AI?

Some believe there is a more secretive, politically-motivated push for a rules-based clampdown in order to "regulate AI into oblivion" as Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Conservative-leaning Capital Research Centre think-tank, put it on X this week.

His post was viewed nearly eight million times. It is an extreme and unproven view but it shows that not everybody is on board with the idea of regulation saving the day.

Whatever the reality, the storm currently engulfing the AI industry could already have caused reputational damage to the firms currently in pole position forever.

As Professor Hall puts it: "Would you invest in a company that says it's going to bring about human extinction?"

Additional reporting by Tom McArthur

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