Some of the world’s biggest tech companies pledged to work together to guard against the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) as they wrapped up a two-day AI summit, also attended by multiple governments, in Seoul.
Sector leaders from South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co to Google promised at the event, cohosted with the UK, to “minimize risks” and develop new AI models responsibly, even as they push to move the field forward.
The fresh commitment, codified in a “Seoul AI Business Pledge” yesterday, plus a new round of safety commitments announced the previous day, build on the consensus reached at the inaugural global AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in England last year.
Photo: AP
Tuesday’s commitment saw companies, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind Technologies, promise to share how they assess the risks of their technologies — including those “deemed intolerable” and how they would ensure such thresholds are not crossed.
However, experts said it is hard for regulators to understand and manage AI when the sector is developing so rapidly.
“I think that’s a really, really big problem,” said Markus Anderljung, head of policy at the Centre for the Governance of AI, a non-profit research organization based in Oxford, England.
“Dealing with AI, I expect to be one of the biggest challenges that governments all across the world will have over the next couple of decades,” Anderljung said. “The world will need to have some kind of joint understanding of what are the risks from these sort of most advanced general models.”
UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Michelle Donelan yesterday said in Seoul that “as the pace of AI development accelerates, we must match that speed ... if we are to grip the risks.”
There would be more opportunities at the next AI summit in France to “push the boundaries” in terms of testing and evaluating new technology, she said.
“Simultaneously, we must turn our attention to risk mitigation outside these models, ensuring that society ... becomes resilient to the risks posed by AI,” Donelan said.
The stratospheric success of ChatGPT soon after its 2022 release sparked a gold rush in generative AI, with tech firms around the world pouring billions of dollars into developing their own models.
Such AI models can generate text, photographs, audio and even video footage from simple prompts, and its proponents have heralded them as breakthroughs that would improve lives and businesses around the world.
However, critics, rights activists and governments have said that they can be misused in a wide variety of ways, including the manipulation of voters through “deepfake” pictures and videos of politicians.
Many have called for international standards to govern the development and use of AI.
“I think there’s increased realization that we need global cooperation to really think about the issues and harms of artificial intelligence. AI doesn’t know borders,” said Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethics expert and founder of Humane Intelligence, an independent non-profit that evaluates and assesses AI models.
It is not just the “runaway AI” of science fiction nightmares that is a huge concern, but issues such as rampant inequality in the sector, Chowdhury said in Seoul.
“All AI is just built, developed and the profits reaped [by] very, very few people and organizations,” she said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS