In Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , the Deep Thought supercomputer took 7.5m years to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything and came up with 42. Then it asked for another 10m years to work out what the question was.

Adams’s joke has become an accidental satire on AI because Tao and his colleagues are now wading through OpenAI’s answers to work out how it reached them.

At 51, Tao could be forgiven for not wanting to tidy up after Silicon Valley, although he has worked with OpenAI and still has contacts there. The Australian, speaking via video from California where he is professor of mathematics at UCLA, is one of the youngest winners of the Fields Medal (the maths Nobel), and has a slew of other prizes honouring his contributions.…