We did not proceed with the transaction to test Jessy's claims. While his casual attitude suggested he might have been a scammer, his ability to advertise on Meta and operate on Telegram highlights apparent loopholes that real gun dealers could exploit. When contacted, Meta told the BBC that the adverts we highlighted had been "automatically disabled in line with our policies", and that inclusion in its ad library "doesn't necessarily mean the ad is still live or visible". Telegram said that Jessy's account had been proactively removed for breaching its policies. A spokesperson added: "The sale of weapons is explicitly forbidden by Telegram's terms of service and is removed whenever discovered. Moderators empowered with custom AI and machine learning tools proactively monitor public parts of the platform and accept reports in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day, including the sale of weapons."

Arguably, the open source movement -- the idea that a group of technologists freely contributing their own work and commenting on the work of others, can create a final product that is comparable with anything that a commercial enterprise might create -- has been one of the great innovation catalysts of the technology industry. It's no wonder, then, that a group of Silicon Valley luminaries -- including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman -- have lined up to contribute $1 billion to a new open-source AI project known as OpenAI that is led by Ilya Sutskever, one of the world's top experts in machine learning. For now, we don't really know. The OpenAI website is basically just a single blog post outlining the organization's manifesto and an "About" page detailing all the technologists and engineers working on the project. Thus far, we only have a long announcement from the founding members that they are going to do something amazing.