Here’s the strange thing about a trillion. It’s obviously a blooming massive number; yet it’s hard to comprehend just how big. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds, though, equates to 31,688 years.

So when I say that a trillion dollars were wiped from Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia’s share price recently, it’s definitely a big deal. Nvidia’s market value plummeted immediately after the revelation that a Chinese team had built an AI model that performed broadly on par with the best American AI models, but was built using far less computing power at a fraction of the price.