From Bletchley Park to AlexNet: A Personal Journey into the Heart of AI

This summer, I found myself on an unexpected but profoundly resonant journey — one that spanned continents and decades of AI history. From the secretive halls of Bletchley Park in England to the forward-looking labs of the University of Toronto, this was more than sightseeing; it was a reflection on the past, present, and future of intelligence — both artificial and human.

My trip began with a visit to Bletchley Park, the historic site of British codebreaking during WWII and now a symbol of how computation first began to shape the modern world. It was here that Turing's legacy lingered — a silent testament to the power of algorithms before we even had a name for them. Not long after, Bletchley played host to the historic AI Safety Summit, where leaders like Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and representatives from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic gathered to shape how AI might evolve safely1.

A few weeks later, I found myself across the Atlantic at the University of Toronto, standing in the very corridor where AlexNet was born. My son and I were lucky to chat with a warm and insightful staff member in the department office, who shared stories about the early days of deep learning and the impact of researchers like Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, and Ilya Sutskever. On the walls were posters tracing the evolution of backpropagation and vector spaces — humble-looking artifacts that quietly marked the beginning of a deep learning revolution. A framed photo of Ilya accepting his honorary degree from the university was a subtle but powerful reminder of how quickly AI had gone from fringe to frontier.

And then came Hinton’s words — unsettling but necessary. In a recent talk, he remarked:

"If you sleep well at night, you may not have understood."

Here’s that talk, which framed much of my thinking during the trip:

Just before Toronto, I had spent time in London, visiting King’s College, where they’ve just launched a new Philosophy & AI Ethics programme. The shift in conversation was palpable — less about capability, more about accountability. We’re moving from “Can we build it?” to “Should we?”

The whole experience reminded me of Journey to the West, the ancient Chinese novel that inspired the name CloudMonkey.io. In it, Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, gains immense knowledge and power, rebels against heaven, and eventually must learn humility and balance. In many ways, our relationship with AI is on a similar arc — we’re building systems that may soon exceed our understanding, and the need for restraint, wisdom, and spiritual clarity is growing louder.

So here we are: standing at a crossroads between legacy and frontier. Between wartime cryptography and billion-parameter language models. Between Sun Wukong’s magical staff and the GPU clusters training the next GPT.

CloudMonkey.io was always meant to be more than a name. It’s a space to reflect, to learn, and to navigate the digital journey with curiosity and care. As we build and automate and optimise, let’s not forget to ask why — and for whom.

UK AI Safety Summit (Bletchley Park): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-2023-summary ↩