The United Kingdom and South Korea are to co-host the second worldwide AI conference in Seoul this week.
TakeAway Points:
- South Korea and the United Kingdom will co-host the second global AI summit in Seoul this week, as the breathtaking pace of innovation since the first AI summit in November leaves governments scrambling to keep up with a growing array of risks.
- According to the official summit website, the topics of discussion will be threefold: AI safety, innovation, and inclusivity.
- However, it is not yet clear who will be present for the in-person meeting on Wednesday, which will be chaired by ministers from South Korea and the United Kingdom, or the virtual summit on Tuesday.
Second AI Summit
Governments are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the growing range of hazards due to the astounding rate of innovation that has occurred since the first AI summit in November.
According to the report, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will oversee a virtual summit on Tuesday. There will be demands for stronger regulation of artificial intelligence, despite stark differences in the potential effects of the technology on humankind.
“Although positive efforts have been made to shape global AI governance, significant gaps still remain,” Sunak and Yoon said in a joint opinion article published in the UK’s newspaper and South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo, entitled ‘Only global AI standards can stop a race to the bottom’.
AI Summit on AI Safety, Innovation, and Inclusion
Although the AI Safety Summit was the name of the November event, the challenges have since grown in scope. The gatherings, which start on Tuesday, are now referred to as the AI Seoul Summit. According to the official summit website, the topics of discussion will be threefold: AI safety, innovation, and inclusivity.
“Risks such as large-scale labour market impacts, AI-enabled hacking or biological attacks, and society losing control over general-purpose AI could emerge,” although there is debate about the likelihood, a global AI safety report released on Friday said.
“But… it will be the decisions of societies and governments that will determine the future of AI,” said the report backed by experts from more than 30 countries.
The report acknowledges that there are an increasing number of problems associated with the quickly developing technology, including existential risks to humanity, inequity in AI, data scarcity, the usage of copyrighted material, and environmental effects from the massive amounts of electricity AI data centres consume.
Bletchley Declaration
Elon Musk of Tesla and Sam Altman of OpenAI met with some of their most vociferous detractors during the November summit held in the UK, and China signed the “Bletchley Declaration” on collaboratively managing AI risks with the US and other signatories.
However, it is not yet clear who will be present for the in-person meeting on Wednesday, which will be chaired by ministers from South Korea and the United Kingdom, or the virtual summit on Tuesday.
Jack Clark, co-founder of AI safety and research firm Anthropic, as well as representatives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, and IBM, are expected to attend a different AI symposium hosted by South Korea on Wednesday.
