- Here in Bangkok it’s monsoon season, and the tropical heat and humidity are making for uncomfortable conditions. But within the safely air-conditioned Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre, at the annual summit of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), something else is making attendees hot under the collar. Officials and regulators have been telling me one after another how terrified they are of the all-powerful AI tools being built at breakneck speed – and which could presage the meltdown of the global financial system. Britain may have once played a key role in the development of AI – through companies such as DeepMind, now owned by Google. But today the major AI players are all American or Chinese – while we have been pushed to the sidelines. Meanwhile, our economy is more vulnerable to this technology spiraling out of control than that of almost any other advanced nation. Together, the City of London and our financial and professional services sectors generate up to 12 per cent of national wealth. Any attack on them would be a direct attack on our resilience. Everyone is long hard assets from here! Bill Gates returned to the Sunday-show circuit this week with a fresh round of alarms about artificial intelligence, telling CNN's Jake Tapper that the technology is "more dangerous than any" cars, planes, or drugs and that "grim possibilities" await if society fails to maintain control. Speaking on State of the Union, the Microsoft co-founder and described AI as "the most dangerous technology humans ever invented." He predicted that "over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises" once "bad people" strip safeguards from the latest models. The real near-term danger, he said, is not AI "getting out of control" - that remains "years away" - but criminals using the tools for extortion, stock-market disruption, or similar schemes that already have proven business models. Paul Tudor Jones appeared on CNBC'