When Guy Rosen said in early May that “ChatGPT is the new crypto”, he didn’t mean it as a compliment, not for cryptocurrency and most certainly not for the new breed of machine-learning software that the US-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI released last November.

Rosen, the chief information security officer at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, was referring to the wave of malware ChatGPT had carried along in its wake, as scammers rushed to cash in on the huge surge of interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence that ChatGPT gave rise to – much to the surprise of its own developers.