When Sydney-based entrepreneur Liesl Yearsley returned from a US trip earlier this year, where she had been talking to potential investors for her company Akin, she admitted to The Australian Financial Review that she was dazzled by the amount of money being thrown at companies that had appended the letters AI to the end of their name.

The artificial intelligence investment boom has been in full flow since late last year, when the existence of generative AI came into the broader public consciousness through OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and it has kept up a fearsome pace ever since.