Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as he explained in a recent interview, he was keen to try a GLP-1, one of those drugs that have revolutionised weight loss in the past five years. You can understand why he was curious. Ozempic or Mounjaro might appear to have nothing in common with artificial intelligence, but both phenomena have created a sensation that we’re entering an era of accelerating and uncontrollable change.

Alas, he screwed it up. He had someone inject him with a megadose, puked all night and then lay in bed for days ‘staring at a white ceiling thinking nothing’, not only feeling no urge to eat but also no ‘desire for anything’.

Running for the bus is now as easy as it was decades ago. But only when I can be bothered to go anywhere

When I read that on X, I knew exactly how Altman felt, or didn’t feel. In a few months I’ve lost three stone on Mounjaro. Now, I’m aware that journalists’ accounts of their weight-loss journeys could qualify for the World Boring Championships imagined by the satirist Michael Wharton in his ‘Peter Simple’ Telegraph column (suggested topics: ‘A history of plywood’ and ‘Parking problems in Wolverhampton’). So I’ll keep it brief.

This is the second time my weight has dropped from 14 to 11 stone. The first time was when I was 20. Thanks to a diet supervised by my mother, for the only time in my life girls hit on ‘Porky’ Thompson; my popularity soared, which told me a lot about how intensely people dislike fatness, even if they don’t say so. Four decades later, friends and colleagues scarcely notice – which speaks volumes about attitudes to old people; if they’re thinner, it will just make life easier for the pallbearers.

Never mind. Running for the bus is suddenly as easy as it was decades ago. But – and this is the key point – only on the rare occasions when I can be bothered to go anywhere. I could give Altman lessons in staring at ceilings thinking nothing. I can even out-stare my deaf white cat Moira, who spends hours scrutinising the same patch of wallpaper.

I’ve been a martyr to pathological laziness since I was in the pram. Like Donald Trump, I maintain that ‘talking is a form of exercise’ and leave it at that. From time to time I torment myself by reading the dust-jacket of a book published in 1996 – ‘the debut of a promising new writer’. That was me. The promise wasn’t fulfilled because if there’s one thing I can’t bear it’s writing. To quote another American president: ‘They say hard work never killed anyone, but I figured: why take the chance?’ That was Reagan, who didn’t allow cabinet meetings to disturb his schedule of afternoon soap operas.

And then, late in life, I discovered Mounjaro. The weight fell off and I fell into bed. Several times a day. For the first time ever, I lost interest in listening to music. Buying the 41-disc boxed set of remastered Antal Dorati Haydn recordings was no problem: Amazon’s one-click purchasing works perfectly well from a horizontal position. Listening to them? Some other time.

I asked my friend Dr Max Pemberton, an NHS psychiatrist who is also a writer of genius, what was going on. ‘It makes perfect sense to me,’ he said. Max knows that I have a long history of addiction to alcohol and psychotropic prescription drugs. I haven’t touched the former since 1994, and the latter since… well, if I’m being honest, about eight o’clock this morning, when I started writing this piece. But I’ll get to that shortly.

Max explained that GLP-1s have a profound effect on reward regions of the brain that goes far beyond suppressing appetite, and that this effect is likely to be magnified in someone like me whose neural reward pathways have been overstimulated for decades. Even the harmless thrill of listening to Haydn’s ‘Military’ symphony is reduced. Thankfully the music problem seems to have sorted itself out, but the enhanced laziness still dogs me. It’s a miracle I can be bothered to write these words – and that miracle, I’m embarrassed to admit, comes in the form of a lozenge-shaped pill.

Modafinil is a stimulant drug that increases dopamine levels without the adverse effects of classical stimulants such as amphetamine or cocaine. What it does do is increase motivation and powers of concentration as reliably as Mounjaro reduces ‘food noise’. This one did work for Altman. ‘Man, do you get a productivity boost,’ he told an interviewer.

Since Silicon Valley is awash with modafinil and other cognitive enhancers, it’s likely that the accelerated development of artificial intelligence has been boosted by these drugs. There’s no way of proving that, of course. But what we do know is that there’s a blossoming relationship between AI and the development of drugs which affect mood, perception and behaviour. According to Scientific American, ‘researchers have used the protein-structure-prediction tool AlphaFold to identify hundreds of thousands of potential new psychedelic molecules which could help develop new kinds of antidepressants’. But why should they stop at antidepressants?

Let the cognitive games begin. Or, in my case, wind down. The dopamine produced by my 200mg of modafinil is fast running out. It’s time to drag my slim body back to the bedroom, where there’s a deliciously empty white ceiling waiting to be stared at.