Over the past year and a half, many have been desperate to share a stage with artificial intelligence wunderkind Sam Altman. Microsoft couldn’t wait to wheel out the OpenAI co-founder to show how ahead of the game it was; world leaders stood beside him to show how they were in the loop on the future; and conference organisers contorted their schedules to accommodate the most powerful man in the world of AI.

Yet, while Altman was in attendance at Apple’s developer conference this week, he was a spectator like almost everyone else. It was disappointing for him, you might think, because it was arguably the most significant public moment so far in OpenAI’s short history: ChatGPT is on the cusp of gaining hundreds of millions of new users through the world’s most popular devices.

Bloomberg Opinion