It’s the geo-politics, stupid

Back in early 2023, when ChatGPT was seizing the world’s imagination, two of Sunak’s closest aides — Will Tanner and Liam Booth-Smith — sat down with Henry de Zoete, a rangy, affable entrepreneur, whose claim to fame includes securing the best ever deal on the TV show “Dragon’s Den.”

De Zoete, who had crossed paths with Altman when the pair were at Silicon Valley venture capital giant Y Combinator, had become deeply interested in AI towards the end of the 2010s, devouring internet blogs including Tim Urban’s “Wait But Why.” 

Urban, who called the technology “by far THE most important topic for our future” in 2015, charted the path to AGI and beyond, to Artificial Superintelligence, where machine brains outperform human brains in practically every field, “including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills,” he wrote, quoting Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s definition of the term. (Not all experts agree the technology will ever reach such heights.) 

De Zoete was taken by the promise of such a force — but acutely sensitive to its dangers too. Tanner and Booth-Smith were struck by the importance and level of seriousness de Zoete gave the technology, which was by then going mainstream. “AI is simply the most important technology in humanity’s history,” de Zoete told POLITICO in an interview for this piece. 

Sunak’s team spied an opportunity for their boss, at that point newly installed in No. 10. Could the rise of AI give their geeky principle a chance to genuinely drive the international agenda? In the Stanford-educated technofile, they felt that they had a PM who could potentially be one of the most credible leaders — if not the most credible — on the world stage on the nascent technology.

Mired down in domestic woes, with a cost of living crisis and opinion polls showing them on course for electoral annihilation, Sunak’s team saw a chance to cast a new place for post-Brexit Britain, as a driver of the global agenda in an area that had produced several discussion forums at the OECD and G7-level, for instance, but little in the way of providing active solutions. On the domestic front too, insiders said, aides saw an upside in identifying an arena in which Sunak could shine — and enjoy — at a time when he was floundering in other areas.