Digital officials, tech company bosses and researchers yesterday converged at a former code-breaking spy base near London to discuss and better understand the extreme risks posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI).
The two-day summit focuses on so-called frontier AI — the latest and most powerful systems that take the technology right up to its limits, but could come with as-yet-unknown dangers. They are underpinned by foundation models, which power chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and are trained on vast pools of information scraped from the Internet.
About 100 people from 28 countries are expected to attend British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s two-day AI Safety Summit, although the British government has refused to disclose the guest list.
Photo: AP
The event is a labor of love for Sunak, a tech-loving former banker who wants the UK to be a hub of computing innovation and has framed the summit as the start of a global conversation about the safe development of AI.
However, US Vice President Kamala Harris was yesterday due to steal the focus with a separate speech in London setting out the US administration’s more hands-on approach.
She is due to attend the summit today alongside government officials from more than two dozen countries, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan and Saudi Arabia, as well as China, which was invited over the protests of some members of Sunak’s governing Conservative Party.
Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk is also scheduled to discuss AI with Sunak in a livestreamed conversation tonight. The tech billionaire was among those who signed a statement earlier this year raising the alarm about the perils that AI poses to humanity.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and executives from US AI companies such as Anthropic PBC and influential computer scientists such as Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, are also expected.
The meeting is being held at Bletchley Park, a former top-secret base for World War II code-breakers that is considered as the birthplace of modern computing.
One of Sunak’s major goals is to get delegates to agree on a first-ever communique about the nature of AI risks.
He has said the technology brings new opportunities, while earning of frontier AI’s threat to humanity, because it could be used to create biological weapons or be exploited by terrorists to sow fear and destruction.
Only governments, not companies, can keep people safe from AI’s dangers, Sunak said last week. However, in the same speech, he also urged against rushing to regulate AI technology, saying it needs to be fully understood first.
In contrast, Harris aims to stress the need to address the here and now, including “societal harms that are already happening such as bias, discrimination and the proliferation of misinformation.”
Harris plans to say that US Joe Biden’s administration is “committed to hold companies accountable, on behalf of the people, in a way that does not stifle innovation,” including through legislation.
She is to point to Biden’s executive order this week, setting out AI safeguards, as evidence that the US is leading by example in developing rules for AI that work in the public interest.
Among measures she is to announce is an AI safety institute, run through the US Department of Commerce, to help set the rules for “safe and trusted AI.”
Harris is also to encourage other countries to sign up to a US-backed pledge to stick to “responsible and ethical” use of AI for military aims.
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