Rishi Sunak is too late – the AI monster is at the door

He must be a busy man, Rishi Sunak. When he’s not rescuing the country from inflation, sending the Royal Navy towards troublezones, making long term decisions for a brighter future, herding worried Conservative MPs towards the lemming-edge of the next election, and organising globally important AI summits, I doubt he has much time to read the darker recesses of TwitterX and Reddit where he might have come across a character named ‘Jimmy Apples’.

Which is a shame, in terms of that AI conference – being held this week at Bletchley Park, the “home of computing”. Because this summit seems like a sincere and valuable attempt to achieve some global governance of artificial intelligence, even as it explodes into every corner of our lives. In which case Sunak, the host, would be better equipped if he knew of the short, remarkable oeuvre of Mr Apples.

Apples first surfaced some months ago, as a random anonymous user on Twitter/X, while implying he was an insider at OpenAI – the most famous AI company of the moment. Then he put some flesh on the bones. On 4 March, he predicted that the next iteration of OpenAI’s famous Generative Pretrained Transformers, GPT-4, would be premiered on 14 March.